chalmers@arizona.edu
In the Garden of Eden, we had unmediated contact with the world. We were directly acquainted with objects in the world and with their properties. Objects were simply presented to us without causal mediation, and properties were revealed to us in their true intrinsic glory.
When an apple in Eden looked red to us, the apple was gloriously, perfectly, and primitively red. There was no need for a long causal chain from the microphysics of the surface through air and brain to a contingently connected visual experience. Rather, the perfect redness of the apple was simply revealed to us. The qualitative redness in our experience derived entirely from the presentation of perfect redness in the world.
Eden was a world of perfect color. But then there was a Fall.
First, we ate from the Tree of Illusion. After this, objects sometimes seemed to have different colors and shapes at different times, even though there was reason to believe the object itself had not changed. So the connection between visual experience and the world became contingent: we could no longer accept that visual experience always revealed the world exactly as it is.
Second, we ate from the Tree of Science. After this, we found that when we see an object, there is always a complex causal chain involving the transmission of light from the object to the retina, and the transmission of electrical activity from the retina to the brain. This chain was triggered by microphysical properties whose connection to the qualities of our experience seemed entirely contingent. So there was no longer reason to believe in acquaintance with the glorious primitive properties of Eden, and there was no reason to believe that objects in the world had these properties at all.
We no longer live in Eden. Perhaps Eden never existed, and perhaps it could not have existed. But Eden still plays a powerful role in our perceptual experience of the world. At some level, perception represents our world as an Edenic world, populated by perfect colors and shapes, with objects and properties that are revealed to us directly. And even though we have fallen from Eden, Eden still acts as a sort of ideal that regulates the content of our perceptual experience. Or so I will argue.
My project in this paper concerns the phenomenal content of perceptual experience. This notion can be defined in terms of the notions of phenomenal character and representational content.
The phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is what it is like to have that experience. Two perceptual experiences share their phenomenal character if what it is like to have one is the same as what it is like to have the other. We can say that in such a case, the experiences instantiate the same phenomenal properties. As I use the term "perceptual experience", it is true by definition that any perceptual experience has phenomenal character. As I use the term, it is not true by definition that every perceptual experience has an object in the external world: hallucinatory experiences count as perceptual experiences.
A representational content of a perceptual experience is a condition of satisfaction of the experience. I will take it for granted that perceptual experiences can be veridical or nonveridical: they can represent the world correctly or incorrectly. Intuitively, perceptual illusions and hallucinations are nonveridical, while non-illusory perceptual experiences of objects in the external world are veridical. And intuitively, a given experience will be either veridical or nonveridical, depending on what the world is like. If so, we can say that an experience is associated with a condition of satisfaction. If the world satisfies the condition, then the experience will be veridical; if the world fails to satisfy the condition, the experience will be nonveridical. For example, one might plausibly hold that an ordinary experience of a red square in front of one will be veridical roughly when there is a red square in front of one.
A phenomenal content of a perceptual experience is a representational content that is determined by the experience's phenomenal character. More precisely: a representational content C of a perceptual experience E is a phenomenal content if and only if necessarily, any experience with the same phenomenal character as E has representational content C.
Put this way, it is a substantive thesis that perceptual experiences have phenomenal content. But there is good reason to believe that they do. The basic reason has been articulated at length by Siewert (1998). It is plausible that perceptual experiences are assessable for accuracy, in virtue of their phenomenal character. Intuitively, by virtue of their phenomenal character, experiences present the world as being a certain way. My experience of a red square in front of me has a certain phenomenal character, and by virtue of this phenomenal character, the experience places a constraint on the world. The world can be such as to satisfy the constraint imposed by the phenomenal character of the experience, or such as to fail to satisfy the constraint. This is to say that the phenomenal character determines a condition of satisfaction for the experience, one that is shared by any experience with the same phenomenal character. This condition of satisfaction will be a phenomenal content.
The plausible thesis that perceptual experiences have phenomenal content leaves many other questions open. For example, the thesis is neutral on whether phenomenal character is prior (in some sense) to representational content, or vice versa. It is compatible with the thesis that phenomenal character is grounded in representational content (as held by Dretske 1995 and Tye 1995, among others), and it is compatible with the thesis that representational content is grounded in phenomenal character (as held by Searle 1990 and Horgan and Tienson 2002, among others).
The thesis also leaves open the nature of phenomenal content. On the face of it, there are many ways to associate representational contents with perceptual experience. For example, one might associate a perceptual experience with an object-involving content (the content that O is F, where O is the object of the experience), an existential property-involving content (for example, the content that there exists something in location L that is F), a content involving modes of presentation of these objects and properties (more on this shortly), and perhaps others.
My own view is that one should be a pluralist about representational content. It may be that experiences can be associated with contents of many different sorts by different relations: we can call such relation content relations. For example, there may be one content relation that associates experiences with object-involving contents, and another that associates experiences with existential contents. Each of the different sorts of content, and the corresponding content relations, may have a role to play for different explanatory purposes. On this view, there may not be such a thing as the representational content of a perceptual experience. Instead, a given experience may be associated with multiple representational contents via different content relations.
On the other hand, not all of these contents are equally plausible candidates to be phenomenal contents. Some of these contents seem to be such that they can vary independently of the phenomenal character of an experience. If so, they may be representational contents of the experience, but they are not phenomenal contents. More precisely, we can say that a given content relation is a phenomenal content relation when necessarily, any two experiences with the same phenomenal character are related by the content relation to the same content. A phenomenal content relation relates a given experience to a phenomenal content of the experience. For ease of usage, I will speak of the phenomenal content of an experience, but we should leave open the possibility that there is more than one phenomenal content relation, so that a given experience can be associated with phenomenal contents of more than one sort. Later in the paper I will explore this possibility in detail.
In this paper, I will focus on the question: what is the phenomenal content of a perceptual experience? This is a more constrained question than the corresponding question simply about representational content. But it is an important question to answer. On the face of it, the phenomenal content of an experience is an extremely important aspect of its representational content: it captures a way in which the world is presented in the phenomenology of the experience. One can reasonably expect that if we can understand phenomenal content, this will help us to understand the relationship between phenomenal character and representational content, and it may well help us to understand the nature of phenomenology itself.
In what follows, I will first consider and reject one hypothesis about phenomenal content (a Russellian hypothesis) and will argue for another hypothesis (a Fregean hypothesis). (In doing so I will cover ground also covered in Chalmers 2004, although in a slightly different way, so those familiar with that paper might just skim the next two sections.) I will then raise certain problems for the Fregean hypothesis, involving its phenomenological adequacy. I will argue that these problems are best handled by moving to a more refined view of phenomenal content, one that gives Edenic representation a key role.
I will focus on the phenomenal content of visual experiences, and especially of experiences of color. I think that the conclusions generalize, however, and I will discuss the generalization later in the paper. I will take the canonical sort of experience as an experience as of an object having a certain color at a certain location. Our experiences typically present objects to us as having a certain distribution of colors at different locations on their surfaces. A book might be presented to me as being certain shades of blue at some points on its surface and as being certain shades of red at other points. For simplicity, I will focus just on the experience of color at a specific point: for example, the experience of a book's being a specific shade of blue at a specific location.
What is the phenomenal content of such an experience? That is, what sort of representational content is shared by all experiences with the same phenomenal character as the original experience?
A first attempt at an answer to this question might be the following: the experience represents object O (the book) as having color C (a specific shade of blue) at location L (a particular point in space). So one can associate the experience with the following condition of satisfaction: the experience is satisfied iff object O has color C at location L. This is an object-involving content: it involves a specific object O, and its satisfaction depends on the properties of O. We can say that in this case, the experience attributes a certain sort of color property to the object O.
It is plausible that experiences have contents of this sort. When a certain book appears red to us, there is a quite reasonable sense in which the experience will be satisfied iff the book in question is red at the relevant location. That is, satisfaction conditions for experiences can often be understood in terms of the instantiation of certain properties (such as redness) by certain objects (such as the book). In these cases, we can say that the experience attributes the property to the object.
It is implausible that this object-involving content is a phenomenal content, however. On the face of it, there might be an experience with the same phenomenal character as the original experience, directed at a quite different object O' (perhaps an experience that I could have when looking at a different copy of the same book, for example). And plausibly, there might be an experience with the same phenomenal character as the original experience, directed at no object at all (a hallucinatory experience, for example). These experiences could not have an object-involving content involving the original object O: the former experience will at best have a content involving a different object O', and the latter experience may have no object-involving content at all. If so, the object-involving content is not phenomenal content.[*]
*[[One sort of disjunctivism about perceptual experience (disjunctivism about phenomenology) denies that experiences directed at different objects could have the same phenomenology, and denies that a hallucinatory experience could have the same phenomenology as an experience of an external object. On this view, phenomenal content might be object-involving. I will assume that this view is false in what follows. Another variety of disjunctivism (disjunctivism about metaphysics) allows that a hallucinatory experience and an ordinary perceptual experience may share phenomenal character, but holds that they have a fundamentally distinct underlying metaphysical nature: one experience involves an object and one does not. I will be neutral about this view in what follows. A third variety (disjunctivism about content) allows that these experiences have the same phenomenology, but holds that they have different representational contents: for example, experiences of different objects will have different object-involving contents. Proponents of this view will agree that these object-involving contents are not phenomenal contents. They may deny that there is any phenomenal content, holding that the relevant experiences share no content, or they may accept that there is phenomenal content while holding that it is less fundamental than object-involving content. I am inclined to reject both varieties of disjunctivism about content, but I will not assume that they are false. In what follows I will in effect argue against the former view, but some of what I say may be compatible with the latter view.]]
A somewhat more plausible candidate for the phenomenal content of the experience is the following: the experience represents that there is an object that has color C at location L. This content is not object-involving: in effect it is existentially quantified, so it does not build in any specific object. Unlike the object-involving content, this content can be had by experiences that are directed at different objects or at no object at all. The content is property-involving, however: in effect, it has a color property and a location property as its constituents. To the content to be a remotely viable candidate for phenomenal content, the location property cannot be an absolute location property: a phenomenally identical experience might be had in a quite different location, and it is not plausible that this experience could attribute the same absolute location property as the original experience. Rather, the location property must be a relative location property: the property of being a certain distance in front of the perceiver at a certain angle, for example.
The contents discussed above are all Russellian contents, in that they are composed from objects and properties. The object-involving content can be seen as a certain structured complex of an object, a location property, and a color property, while the existential content can be seen as a structured complex involving an existential quantifier, a location property, and a color property. We can say that both of these contents involve the attribution of certain specific properties, although in one case the properties are attributed to specific objects, and in the other case to an unspecified object under an existential quantifier. Contents of this sort contrast with Fregean contents, composed from modes of presentation of objects and properties in the world, to be discussed shortly.
Let us say that the Russellian hypothesis holds that the phenomenal content of a perceptual experience is a sort of Russellian content. To assess this hypothesis, I will henceforth abstract away from issues involving the representation of objects, and will focus on the representation of properties. In particular, I will focus on the representation of color properties — or at least on the representation of properties by color experience. Later, I will discuss the generalization to other properties.
On the Russellian hypothesis, the phenomenal content that is distinctively associated with color experience will be a Russellian property-involving content, involving the attribution of a property C. The Russellian hypothesis requires the Russellian constraint: all phenomenally identical color experiences attribute the same property to their object.
Strictly speaking, the Russellian hypothesis requires only that globally identical experiences attribute the same property to their objects, so that the property attributed may depend on the holistic character of a visual experience, including its spatial phenomenal character and its overall pattern of color phenomenal character. For simplicity, I will usually assume a view on which the property attributed depends on the local phenomenal character of the experience, so that any two experiences with the same local phenomenal character in respect of color will attribute the same property. Nothing important will depend on this assumption, however.
We can say two experiences that share their local phenomenal character instantiate the same local phenomenal properties. Local phenomenal properties include properties such as phenomenal redness: this is a property instantiated by all experiences that share a certain specific and determinate local phenomenal character, one that is often caused (in us) by seeing things with a certain specific shade of red. ("Phenomenal red_31-ness" might be a more apt label for a determinate property than "phenomenal redness", but I will use expressions of the latter sort for ease of usage.) Note that phenomenal redness (a property of experiences) will plausibly be distinct from ordinary redness, and from the property attributed by phenomenally red experiences.
If the phenomenal content of color experience is Russellian, what sort of properties does it attribute? Intuitively, these properties are color properties: a phenomenally red experience plausibly attributes redness, for example. I will not assume this in what follows, so that room is left open for views on which color experiences represent properties other than color properties. However, the natural hypotheses concerning the nature of the attributed properties correspond fairly closely to the standard range of options concerning the nature of color properties.
One might hold that the properties attributed are physical properties: something along the lines of a surface spectral reflectance. One might hold that the properties attributed are dispositional properties, involving the disposition to cause a certain sort of experience in appropriate conditions. One might hold that the properties attributed are mental properties of some sort: perhaps properties that are actually instantiated by one's experiences or by one's visual fields. Or one might hold that the properties instantiated are primitive properties: simple intrinsic qualities, of the sort that might have been instantiated in Eden.
Each of these views is a version of the Russellian hypothesis: we might call them physicalist, dispositionalist, projectivist, and primitivist versions of Russellianism about phenomenal content. (The projectivist and primitivist views correspond to what Shoemaker (1990) calls "literal" and "figurative" projectivism, except that I take primitivism to be neutral on whether the relevant properties are actually instantiated.) Each of these views is held by some philosophers. For example, the physicalist view is held by Tye (1995); the dispositionalist view is held by Shoemaker (2001); the projectivist view is held by Boghossian and Velleman (1989); and the primitivist view is held by Maund (1995).[*]
*[[The physicalist view is also held by Byrne and Hilbert (2003), Dretske (1995), and Lycan (1996). Version of the dispositionalist view are also held by Egan (forthcoming) and Kriegel (2002). Versions of the primitivist view are also held by Campbell (1993), Holman (2002), Johnston (forthcoming), McGinn (1996), Thau (2002), and Wright (2003). See Stoljar (forthcoming) and Chalmers (2004) for more discussion of these alternatives.]]
Each of these views has well-known problems. The physicalist view is incompatible with intuitions about inversion, according to which phenomenally identical color experiences could have represented quite different physical properties in different environments, and it also seems to be incompatible with the internalist intuition that phenomenal character does not constitutively depend on an individual's environment. The dispositionalist view is incompatible with the intuition that color experience attributes non-relational properties, and also has serious difficulties in individuating the relevant dispositions so that phenomenally identical experiences always attribute the same dispositions. The projectivist and primitivist views suffer from the problem that it seems that that the relevant properties are not actually instantiated by external objects, with the consequence that all color experience is illusory.
These problems have been discussed extensively elsewhere by others and by me (see Chalmers 2004), so I will not dwell on them here. But one can summarize the problems with the following general argument against a Russellian view.
(1) Some phenomenally red experiences of ordinary objects are veridical.
(2) Necessarily, a phenomenally red experience of an object is veridical iff its object instantiates the property attributed by the experience.
(3) The properties attributed by color experiences are nonrelational properties.
(4) For any veridical phenomenally red experience of an ordinary object, it is possible that there is a nonveridical phenomenally red experience of an object with the same nonrelational properties as the original object.
___________
(5) There is no property that is attributed by all possible phenomenally red experiences.
Here, premise (1) has obvious plausibility, and premise (2) is a natural part of any view on which experiences attribute properties. Premise (3) is grounded in the phenomenology of color experience, and premise (4) corresponds to a fairly weak inversion claim. In fact a version of (4) with a mere existential quantifier instead of a universal quantifier would suffice for the conclusion. But the universally quantified claim seems no less plausible. Take any veridical phenomenally red experience of an ordinary object: say, of an apple. Then it is plausible that there could be a community (one with a somewhat different visual apparatus, or with a somewhat different environment) in which apples of that sort normally cause phenomenally green experiences rather than phenomenally red experiences, and in which phenomenally red experiences are caused by objects of a quite different sort. In such a community, it might happen that on one occasion in unusual conditions, such an apple causes a phenomenally red experience. It is plausible that such an experience would be nonveridical.
The conclusion follows straightforwardly from the premises: (1) and (4) entail that there are possible veridical and nonveridical phenomenally red experiences of objects with the same nonrelational properties. Conjoined with (2) and (3), one can conclude that there is no property attributed by both experiences. The conclusion entails that that there is no Russellian content that is shared by all phenomenally red experiences (given the natural assumption that if an experience has Russellian content, the property attributed by the experience is attributed by its Russellian content). The argument generalizes straightforwardly from phenomenal redness to any phenomenal property that can be possessed by veridical color experiences, including global phenomenal properties as well as local phenomenal properties. It follows that no veridical experience of an ordinary object has a Russellian phenomenal content. Given that there are veridical experiences of ordinary objects (premise (1)), it follows that the Russellian hypothesis about color experience is false.
One can strengthen the argument by noting that there is no requirement that the original and inverted communities perceive distinct apples. If we replace premises (1) and (4) by the premise that there can be phenomenally identical veridical and nonveridical experiences of the same object, then even without premise (3), it follows that there is no property that is attributed by all phenomenally red experiences. For there is no property that the apple simultaneously possesses and lacks: not even a relational or dispositional property.
(The possibility left open is that what is attributed is what we might call a "relational property radical": perhaps something like normally causes phenomenally red experiences in ---, where the open place is to be filled by the subject of the experience (see Egan (forthcoming) for a view in this vicinity). We could say that different subjects attribute the same relational property radical, which determine different relational properties for different subjects. Of course relational property radicals are not really properties, and this proposal is also subject to the usual phenomenological objections.)
Proponents of Russellian views will respond by denying one of the premises of the argument: depending on the view, they might deny premise (1), (3), or (4) of the original argument. This leads to a well-worn dialectic that I do not want to get into here. For now I will just note that each of the premises enjoys strong intuitive support, and I will take this as strong prima facie reason to believe that the Russellian hypothesis is false.
If we accept premises (1)-(4), we are left with something like the following view. Color experiences attribute nonrelational properties, and these properties are sometimes instantiated by ordinary objects. The most plausible candidates for such properties are intrinsic physical properties, such as surface reflectance properties[*]: so our phenomenally red experiences might attribute a specific physical property, which we can call physical redness. On this view, color experiences have Russellian content that involve the attribution of these properties. However, it is possible that experiences with the same phenomenal character (perhaps in a different community) can have different Russellian contents of this sort, due to differences in the environment of the perceivers. So Russellian content is not phenomenal content.
*[[One might understand a surface reflectance property as a sort of dispositional property, involving dispositions to reflect certain sorts of light. If so, then the physical properties attributed by color experiences should probably be understood to be the categorical bases of surface reflectance properties, rather than reflectance properties themselves. I will usually simply talk of reflectance properties in what follows, however.]]
If one thought that all content were Russellian content, one might conclude from the above that experiences (or at least color experiences) do not have phenomenal content. But this would require denying the strong intuition that experiences are assessable for accuracy in virtue of their phenomenal character. The alternative is to hold that phenomenal content is something other than Russellian content. There is a natural alternative: Fregean content.
Where Russellian content involves objects and properties, Fregean content involves modes of presentation of objects and properties. The idea is familiar from the philosophy of language. Utterances of 'Hesperus is a planet' and 'Phosphorus is a planet' have the same Russellian content (a content attributing planethood to Venus), but a Fregean view holds that they have different Fregean contents. The terms 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' are associated with different modes of presentation of the planet Venus (different Fregean senses, for example), mirroring the difference in their associated cognitive roles. This difference in modes of presentation makes for a different Fregean content for the two utterances.
A natural view of Fregean modes of presentations holds that they are conditions on extension. The extension of an expression is something like an object or a property. The mode of presentation associated with an expression is a condition that an object or property must satisfy in order to qualify as the expression's extension. For a term such as 'Hesperus', for example, one might plausibly hold that the associated mode of presentation is a condition that picks out the bright object at a certain position in the evening sky. For 'Phosphorus', the mode of presentation might be a condition that picks out the bright object at a certain position in the morning sky. In the actual world, both conditions are satisfied by the planet Venus, so Venus is the extension of both expressions.
A pluralist view can allow that utterances have both Russellian and Fregean content, under two distinct content relations. An utterance of 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' might be associated both with a Russellian content (holding that Venus is identical to itself) and a Fregean content (holding roughly that the bright object in the morning sky is identical to the bright object in the evening sky). Both of these contents (and the corresponding content relations) may be useful for different explanatory purposes: the former may be more relevant to evaluating the sentence in counterfactual circumstances, for example, while the latter may be more relevant to analyzing the sentence's epistemic role.
This model also applies to terms that refer to perceptible properties such as colors. For example, a color term such as 'red' might refer to the same physical property as a physical term 'P'. Here, the two expressions will be associated with quite different cognitive roles: an utterance of 'red is P' will be a cognitively significant claim. So there is reason to believe that the color term 'red' has a Fregean content quite distinct from that of the physical expression 'P', even though the two expressions have the same Russellian content.
At this point, it is natural to suggest that perceptual experiences, as well as linguistic expressions, have both Russellian and Fregean content. The Russellian content of a color experience will be the property attributed by the experience. If premises (1)-(3) of the earlier argument are correct, this will plausibly be an intrinsic physical property, such as a surface reflectance property: a phenomenally red experience may attribute physical redness, for example. The Fregean content will be a mode of presentation of that property. On the face of it, color experiences attribute colors under a distinctive mode of presentation (one quite distinct from a physical mode of presentation of the color, for example, and much closer to the mode of presentation associated with a color term). It is natural to suggest that this distinctive mode of presentation corresponds to a distinctive sort of Fregean content. This allows the attractive suggestion that where phenomenally identical experiences can have different Russellian contents, they will always have the same Fregean content. If so, Fregean content is phenomenal content.
What is the Fregean content associated with a color experience? It is a condition that a property must satisfy in order to be the property attributed by the experience. There is a natural candidate for such a condition. Let us assume, as before, that the property attributed by a phenomenally red experience is a physical property such as physical redness. Then one can naturally hold that the associated condition on this property is the following: it must be the property that normally causes phenomenally red experiences (in normal conditions for the perceiver). Plausibly, it is precisely because physical redness satisfies this condition that it is the property attributed by phenomenally red experiences. If so, this suggests that the Fregean content of such an experience is precisely this condition.
This Fregean content is a natural candidate for the phenomenal content associated with phenomenal redness. Certainly this content accommodates inversion scenarios quite straightforwardly. In an environment where phenomenally red experiences are normally caused by physically green things, such an experience will attribute physical greenness, so that its Russellian content differs from the Russellian content of a phenomenally red experience in our environment. But its Fregean content will be exactly the same: both are the condition that picks the property that normally causes phenomenally red experiences in the perceiver. (Here the perceiver will be picked out under an indexical mode of presentation that can be shared between two different perceivers; see the appendix for a way to model this using centered worlds.) Due to differences in the environment, this common Fregean content yields distinct Russellian contents: the condition picks out physical redness in an ordinary environment, and physical greenness in the alternative environment. All this suggests that Fregean content is a plausible candidate to be phenomenal content.
The Fregean content of a given color experience can itself be seen as a condition of satisfaction. To a first approximation, the Fregean content of a phenomenally red experience will be satisfied when there is an object at the appropriate location relative to the perceiver that instantiates the property that normally causes phenomenally red experiences in the perceiver. To a second approximation, one might want to give a corresponding Fregean treatment to the attributed location property (as I will discuss later), and one might want to give a Fregean treatment to the object of the experience (for example, holding that the Russellian content of the experience is the specific object, and that the corresponding Fregean content is the condition that picks out the object that is causing the current experience). For now, I will abstract away from these matters and concentrate on that aspect of the content that is associated with color. But however we flesh out the details, this Fregean content will be a condition of satisfaction for the experience. If the perceiver's environment meets the condition, then the experience will be veridical; if it does not, the experience will be nonveridical.
The Fregean view of phenomenal content can be seen as combining aspects of a physicalist and dispositionalist view of the content of color experiences. As on the physicalist view, physical properties (such as surface properties) constitute the Russellian content of color experience, although on the Fregean view this is not phenomenal content. And as on the dispositionalist view, dispositions to cause certain sorts of experiences are central to the phenomenal content of color experience, although on the Fregean view this is not Russellian content. Instead, the disposition serves as a sort of Fregean mode of presentation for the physical property that is attributed by the experience.
Compared to the Russellian physicalist view of phenomenal content, the Fregean view has the advantage that it can accommodate inversion scenarios straightforwardly. It can also straightforwardly reconcile the environment dependence of Russellian content with the environment-independence of phenomenology. There is good reason to think that Fregean content is a sort of narrow content, which depends only on the internal state of the individual and not on the environment (Chalmers 2002a). This allows us to combine the view that phenomenology is internally determined with the view that phenomenology is intrinsically representational. The sort of content that is intrinsic to phenomenology is (environment-independent) Fregean content. When situated in a particular environment, this yields a Russellian content.
Compared to the Russellian dispositionalist view, the Fregean view has the advantage that it can accommodate the intuition that experiences attribute nonrelational properties. Furthermore, putting the disposition in the mode of presentation removes worries about the individuation of the relevant dispositions: the idea of an indexical property is obscure, but there are already good reasons to believe in indexical modes of presentation. Finally and importantly, the Fregean view can accommodate the strong intuition that things could have been as they perceptually seem to be, even had there been no observers. Counterfactual judgments of this sort generally reflect Russellian content rather than Fregean contents (more generally, they reflect the second dimension in the two-dimensional framework rather than the first). So a view on which Russellian contents are dispositional does not respect these judgments, but a view on which Russellian contents are physical properties (picked out under a dispositional mode of presentation) delivers the intuitively correct results.
The hypothesis that phenomenal content is Fregean content has many virtues. In particular, it seems to capture our intuitions about the environments in which an experience with a given phenomenal character will be veridical, yielding a condition of satisfaction that is determined by phenomenal character. Still, there remains a cluster of worries about the view.
This cluster of worries concerns what we might call the phenomenological adequacy of the view. Simply put, the worry is that Fregean content does not seem to adequately reflect the phenomenal character of an experience. In particular, one can argue that when we introspect and reflect on the way that the world is presented in the phenomenology of perceptual experience, the phenomenology seems to have properties that are in tension with the Fregean view of phenomenal content. These properties include the following:
Relationality: Intuitively, it seems to us that when we have an experience as of a colored object, there is a certain property (intuitively, a color property) that the object seems to have. And intuitively, it is natural to hold that the phenomenology of the experience alone suffices for it to seem that there is an object with that very property. That is, reflection on phenomenology suggests that there is an internal connection between phenomenology and certain properties that objects seem to have. One could put this by saying that the phenomenology of color experience seems to be relational: in virtue of its phenomenology, a specific color experience seems to relate us to a specific color property. If this point is correct, it suggests that color experiences have Russellian phenomenal content.
In a critical discussion of the Fregean view, Shoemaker (this volume) brings this point out by an appeal to the Moorean "transparency" intuition. According to this intuition, we attend to the phenomenal character of an experience by attending to the properties that objects in the world appear to have. An extension of this intuition suggests that we discern similarities and differences in phenomenal character by discerning similarities and differences in the properties that objects in the world seem to have. This suggests a strong connection between phenomenal character and Russellian content.
The phenomenal character of veridical experiences of a given color can be different in different circumstances (e.g. different lighting conditions), and for creatures with different sorts of perceptual systems. So the same color will have to have a number of distinct modes of presentation associated with it. To say that this variation is only a variation in the how of perceptual representation [i.e. a mode of presentation] and in no way a variation in what is represented [i.e. a represented property], seems to me at odds with the phenomenology. When the light brown object in shadow and the dark brown object not in shadow look the same to me, the sameness is experienced as being out there — and in such a case the perception can be perfectly veridical. Similarity in the presenting manifests itself in represented similarity in what is represented, and in the absence of perceptual illusion requires that there is similarity in what is represented. More generally, the best gloss on the Moorean transparency intuition is that the qualitative character that figures in the perception of the color of an object is experienced as in or on the perceived object. (Shoemaker, this volume, p. xx)
One can also bring out the point by appealing to an inversion scenario. Jack and Jill are phenomenal duplicates, but live in different environments. Jack's phenomenally green experiences are normally caused by objects with property X, while Jill's experiences are normally caused by objects with property Y. Shoemaker's point suggests that even if Jack's and Jill's experiences are associated with distinct properties (X and Y), there is a strong intuitive sense in which the objects look to be the same to Jack and to Jill. That is, the phenomenal similarity suggests that there is a common property (intuitively, a sort of greenness) such that the relevant objects look to have that property both to Jack and to Jill.
This intuitive point stands in tension with the Fregean view. The Fregean view entails that Jack's and Jill's experiences share a mode of presentation, but it does not entail that the experiences represent a common property. In fact, it suggests that Jack's and Jill's experiences represent distinct properties, X and Y. So it is difficult for the Fregean view to accommodate any internal connection between an experience's phenomenal character and the properties that it represents.
A related point is that phenomenologically, a color experience appears to represent an object as having a certain specific and determinate property. Intuitively, this specificity and determinacy is tied very closely to the specific and determinate phenomenal character of the experience. According to the Fregean view, while an experience may represent a specific and determinate property, its phenomenal character leaves the nature of this property wide open: the determinate property represented may depend on matters quite extrinsic to the phenomenology. This seems to stand in tension with a strong phenomenological intuition.
Simplicity: A second objection is that Fregean contents seem to be overly complex: one might say that they "overintellectualize" the content of an experience. According to this objection, the phenomenological structure of a visual experience is relatively simple: it represents certain objects as having color and shape properties, and so on. But one cannot find anything like "the normal cause of such-and-such experience" in the visual phenomenology. On the face of it, the "normal cause" relation is not phenomenologically present at all: it is something imposed after the fact by theorists, rather than directly reflecting the experience's phenomenology.
A related objection turns on the fact that Fregean contents require reference to experiences: properties are picked out as the normal cause of a certain type of experience, and objects might be picked out as the cause of a certain token experience. But one can object that the perceptual phenomenology does not (or at least, need not) involve representation of experiences: it need only involve representation of the world. This is another often-invoked aspect of the "transparency" of experiences: the phenomenology of perception usually seems to present the world directly, not in virtue of representation of any experiential intermediaries. Again, to invoke the representation of experience seems to overintellectualize the experience, by introducing complexity that is not apparent in the experience's phenomenology.
Internal unity: A final objection is that it seems that there can be internal unity among the contents of experiences with quite different phenomenal character. For example, one can argue that there is an internal unity between the representation of space in visual and tactile experience, in virtue of which these are constrained to represent a common set of spatial properties. Phenomenologically, it seems that when an object looks flat and when it feels flat, it looks and feels to have the same property (flatness). This commonality seems to hold in virtue of an internal relationship between the phenomenology of visual and tactile experiences. It is arguable that something similar applies to experiences as of the same color in quite different lighting conditions. For example, experiences of a white object in shadow and out of shadow may have quite different phenomenal characters, but it is arguable that the experiences are internally related in a way so that both represent the object as being white.
This internal unity is not straightforwardly accommodated by a Fregean view (assuming that the Fregean view might also apply to experiences of space). One might think that because visual and tactile experiences of space are phenomenally quite different, they will be associated with quite different Fregean modes of presentation. One will represent the normal cause of certain visual experiences, and another will represent the normal cause of certain tactile experiences. It might turn out that as a matter of contingent fact these normal causes coincide, so that the properties represented coincide, but nothing in the experiences themselves guarantees this. This stands in tension with the intuition above that there is an internal phenomenological connection between the tactile and visual representation of space, according to which these have common contents by virtue of their phenomenology. The same goes for the case of phenomenally different experiences as of the same color: the Fregean view suggests that these will have distinct modes of presentation that at best contingently pick out a common property, which stands in tension with the intuition that these experiences have common representational content in virtue of their phenomenology.
I do not think that any of these three objections — from relationality, simplicity, and internal unity — are knockdown objections to the Fregean view. For a start, all of them rest on phenomenological intuitions that could be disputed. I will not dispute them, however: I am inclined to give each of the intuitions some prima facie weight. But even if one takes the intuitions at face value, it is not clear that any of them entail that the Fregean view is false. Rather, I think all of them can be seen as pointing to a certain incompleteness in the Fregean view: the Fregean account so far is not a full story about the phenomenal content of experience. For a full story, the Fregean view needs to be supplemented.
The relationality objection, for example, suggests that there is a Russellian aspect to the phenomenal content of perceptual experience: that phenomenally identical experiences involve representation of some common property. The intuitions here were somewhat equivocal: in the Jack and Jill case, for example, at the same time as have the intuition that some common property is phenomenologically represented (as a Russellian view of phenomenal content would suggest), we also have the intuition that different properties might be represented by virtue of distinct environmental connections (as a Fregean view of phenomenal content would suggest). If we are representational pluralists, these two intuitions need not contradict each other. Rather, they might be reconciled if we adopt a view on which there is both a Russellian and a Fregean aspect to the phenomenal content of experiences. The intuition here does not entail that Fregean content is not phenomenal content: rather, it suggests that Fregean content is not all there is to phenomenal content.
The force of the simplicity objection is somewhat unclear. Construed as an argument against Fregean phenomenal content, it turns on the tacit premise that the phenomenal content of an experience must have a structure that direct mirrors the phenomenological structure of the experience (or perhaps that it directly mirrors the way it seems to us on introspection that the world is perceptually presented). We might call this somewhat elusive idea the "mirroring constraint". A proponent of the Fregean view might reply simply that the mirroring constraint is an unreasonable constraint on an account of the phenomenal content of experience. As we have defined it, phenomenal content is content that supervenes on the phenomenal character of an experience, but there is nothing in this definition that requires a tighter connection than mere supervenience. And the simplicity objection does not give any reason to deny supervenience. So the Fregean may hold that unless one has an argument that supervenience of content on phenomenal character requires mirroring (or unless we redefine the notion of phenomenal content to build in the mirroring constraint by definition), there is no objection to the claim that Fregean content is phenomenal content.
Still, the simplicity objection once again suggests a certain incompleteness in the Fregean view. One might reasonably hold that the supervenience of content on phenomenal character requires some sort of explanation. If there were a direct correspondence between the elements of the content and the elements of phenomenal character, this explanation would be much easier to give. As it is, the extra complexity of Fregean content (such as the invocation of causation and of experience) raises the question of how this complex content is connected to the simple experience. In particular, if one adopts a view on which phenomenal content is somehow grounded in the phenomenology of an experience, then one will need to tell a story about how a complex Fregean content can be grounded in a simple experience. And if one thinks that the phenomenology of an experience is grounded in its phenomenal content, then the same applies in reverse. So there is at least a significant explanatory question here.
Finally, the Fregean view could handle the internal unity objection by saying that visual and tactile experiences of space share a common phenomenal type (in effect, a crossmodal type), and it is this phenomenal type that is relevant to the Fregean mode of presentation of these experiences ("the property that normally causes experiences of type T"). If so, then the different experiences will be constrained to represent a common class of properties. One could likewise suggest that phenomenally distinct experiences of the same color (shadowed and unshadowed, for example) share a phenomenal type, with the same upshot. This raises the question, however, of just how we assign the relevant phenomenal types. Any given experience belongs to many different phenomenal types, and the selection of the crossmodal phenomenal type (in the spatial case) or the phenomenal type shared by shadowed and unshadowed experiences (in the color case) may seem suspiciously ad hoc. At least, we need to fill in the Fregean view with an account of how the mode of presentation associated with a given experience is determined, by specifying a principled basis for the choice of a phenomenal type.
One can summarize the worries above by saying that as it stands, the Fregean view does not seem to fully reflect the presentational phenomenology of perceptual experience: the way that it seems to directly and immediately present certain objects and properties in the world. It is natural to hold that this presentational phenomenology is closely connected to the phenomenal content of experience. So to make progress, we need to attend more closely to this presentational phenomenology, and to how it might be connected to phenomenal content.
It is useful at this point to ask: what view of the content of perceptual experience is the most phenomenologically adequate? That is, if we were simply to aim to take the phenomenology of perceptual experience at face value, what account of content would we come up with? In particular, what view of the content of color experience best mirrors its presentational phenomenology?
Here, I think the answer is clear. The view of content that most directly mirrors the phenomenology of color experience is primitivism. Phenomenologically, it seems to us as if visual experience presents simple intrinsic qualities of objects in the world, spread out over the surface of the object. When I have a phenomenally red experience of an object, the object seems to be simply, primitively, red. The apparent redness does not seem to be a microphysical property, or a mental property, or a disposition, or an unspecified property that plays an appropriate causal role. Rather, it seems to be a simple qualitative property, with a distinctive sensuous nature. We might call this property perfect redness: the sort of property that might have been instantiated in Eden.
One might say: phenomenologically, it seems that visual experience presents the world to us as an Edenic world. Taking the phenomenology completely at face value, visual experience presents a world of where perfect redness and perfect blueness are instantiated on the surface of objects, as they were in Eden. These are simple intrinsic qualities whose nature we seem to grasp fully in perceptual experience. For the world to be exactly the way that my phenomenology seems to present it as being, the world would have to be an Edenic world in which these properties are instantiated.
This suggests a view on which color experiences attribute primitive properties such as perfect redness and perfect blueness to objects. On this view, color experiences have a Russellian content involving the attribution of these primitive properties. Furthermore, this content is naturally taken to be phenomenal content. Intuitively, the nature of the primitive properties that are presented to one is fully determined by the phenomenology of the experience: if an experience attributes a primitive property, any phenomenally identical experience will attribute the same primitive property. So this view is a sort of Russellian primitivism about phenomenal content.
For all its virtues with respect to phenomenological adequacy, the Russellian primitivist view has a familiar problem. There is good reason to believe that the relevant primitive properties are not instantiated in our world. That is, there is good reason to believe that none of the objects we perceive are perfectly red or perfectly green. If this is correct, then the primitivist view entails that all color experiences are illusory.[*]
*[[In practice, primitivists are divided on this issue. For example, Holman, Maund and Wright hold that the primitive properties are uninstantiated and that color experiences are illusory, while Campbell, Johnston, and McGinn hold that primitive properties are instantiated and that color experiences can be veridical.]]
A first reason for doubting that these properties exist came when we ate from the Tree of Illusion. This made it clear that there is no necessary connection between primitive properties and perceptual experiences, and strongly suggested that if there is a connection, it is merely causal and contingent. And once we have accepted that one sometimes has phenomenally red experiences in the absence of perfect redness, it is natural to start to wonder whether the same goes for all of our phenomenally red experiences. This is a relatively weak reason, as the existence of illusions is compatible with the existence of veridical perception, but it is enough to generate initial doubts.
A second and stronger reason came when we ate from the Tree of Science. Science suggests that when we see a red object, our perception of the object is mediated by the reflection or radiation of light from the surface of the object to our eyes and then to our brains. The properties of the object that are responsible for the reflection or radiation of the light appear to be complex physical properties, such as surface spectral reflectances, ultimately grounded in microphysical configurations. Science does not reveal any primitive properties in the object, and furthermore, the hypothesis that objects have the relevant primitive properties seems quite unnecessary in order to explain color perception.
Still, someone might suggest that objects have the primitive properties all the same, perhaps supervening in some fashion in the microphysical properties of the object. In response, one might suggest that this picture will metaphysically complicate the world. It seems at least conceivable that objects with the relevant microphysical properties could fail to instantiate the relevant primitive properties. So it looks as if the relevant primitive properties are a significant addition to the world, over and above the microphysical supervenience base. A primitivist might respond in turn by denying that any metaphysical addition is involved (perhaps denying an inference from conceivability to metaphysical possibility), or by accepting that physicalism about ordinary objects is false.[*] But even if so, there is a remaining problem.
*[[Among primitivists who think that the primitive properties are instantiated, Campbell and McGinn suggest that they metaphysically supervene on microphysical or dispositional properties, so that they are not a metaphysical addition in the strong sense, while Johnston seems willing to accept that they are a strong metaphysical addition.]]
The third and strongest reason for doubting that primitive properties are instantiated stems from an elaboration of the inversion argument given earlier.[*] Take an ordinary object, such as a red apple. It is familiar from everyday experience that such an object can cause phenomenally red experiences of the apple and (in some circumstances) can cause phenomenally green experiences of the apple, without any change in its intrinsic properties. It then seems that there is no obstacle to the existence of a community in which objects with the intrinsic properties of this apple normally cause phenomenally green experiences. We can even imagine that the very same apple normally causes phenomenally red experiences in one community and normally causes phenomenally green experiences in the other.
*[[A version of this sort of argument is deployed by Edwards (1998) against Campbell's version of primitivism.]]
We can now ask: when a subject in the first community has a phenomenally red experience of the apple, and a subject in the second community has a phenomenally green experience of the apple, which of these experiences is veridical?
Intuitively, there is a case for saying that both experiences are veridical. But this is an unhappy answer for the primitivist. On the primitivist view, any phenomenally red experience attributes perfect redness, and any phenomenally green experience attributes perfect greenness. If both experiences are veridical, it follows that the apple instantiates both perfect redness and perfect greenness. The argument generalizes: for any phenomenal color, it seems that there is a community in which the apple normally causes experiences with that phenomenal color. Taking the current line, it will follow that the apple instantiates every perfect color! The choice of an apple was perfectly general here, so it seems to follow that every object instantiates every perfect color. It follows that no color experience of an object can be illusory with respect to color. Whatever the phenomenal color of the experience, the object will have the corresponding primitive property, so the experience will be veridical. This conclusion is perhaps even more counterintuitive than the conclusion that all color experiences are illusory.
A primitivist might suggest that one of the experiences is veridical and one of them is not. But this imposes an asymmetry on what otherwise seems to be a quite symmetrical situation. When a subject in one community has a phenomenally red experience of the apple and a subject in the other community has a phenomenally green experience of the apple, both subjects' perceptual mechanisms are functioning in the way that is normal for those communities. And the perceptual mechanisms themselves, involving light and brain, seem to be symmetrically well-functioning in both communities. Perhaps a primitivist can hold the line and assert that one of the experiences is veridical and one is nonveridical, simply because the apple is perfectly red and it is not perfectly green. But this line leads to the conclusion that color experiences in one of the communities are normally nonveridical (after all, objects like the apple normally cause phenomenally green experiences in that community) where corresponding experiences in the other community are normally veridical.
Apart from the unappealing asymmetry, this view yields a serious skeptical worry: it seems that we have little reason to believe that we are in a community that normally perceives veridically as opposed to nonveridically. After all, nature and evolution will be indifferent between the two communities above. Evolutionary processes will be indifferent between perceivers in which apples produce phenomenally red experiences, perceivers in which apples produce phenomenally green experiences, and perceivers in which apples produce phenomenally blue experiences. Any such perceiver could easily come to exist through minor differences in environmental conditions or brain wiring. If we accept the reasoning above, only a very small subset of the class of such possible perceivers will normally have veridical experiences, and there is no particular reason to think that we are among them.
Once these options are ruled out, the reasonable conclusion is that neither experience is veridical: the apple is neither perfectly red not perfectly green. Generalizing from this case, this reasoning suggests that primitive properties are not instantiated at all. I think that this is clearly the most reasonable view for a primitivist should take: on this view, experiences attribute primitive properties, but their objects never possess these properties.
Still, this view has the consequence that all color experiences are illusory. This is a counterintuitive conclusion, and runs counter to our usual judgments about the veridicality of experience. On the face of it, there is a significant difference between a phenomenally red experience of a red wall and a phenomenally red experience of a white wall that looks red because (unknown to the subject) it is bathed in red light. As we ordinarily classify experiences, the former is veridical and the latter is not. In classifying both experiences as nonveridical, primitivism cannot respect this distinction.
Here is where things stand. The Fregean view of phenomenal content seems to most accurately capture our judgments about veridicality, but it is not especially phenomenologically adequate. The primitivist view of phenomenal content is the most phenomenologically adequate view, but it yields implausible consequences about veridicality. For a way forward, what we need is an account that captures both the phenomenological virtues of the primitivist view and the truth-conditional virtues of the Fregean view. In what follows I will argue that such an account is available.
One can begin to motivate such a view with the following pair of intuitions.
(i) For a color experience to be perfectly veridical — for it to be as veridical as it could be — its object would have to have perfect colors. The perfect veridicality of color experience would require that our world is an Edenic world, in which objects instantiate primitive color properties.
(ii) Even if the object of an experience lacks perfect colors, a color experience can be imperfectly veridical: veridical according to our ordinary standard of veridicality. Even after the fall from Eden, our imperfect world has objects with properties that suffice to make our experiences veridical, by our ordinary standards.
This pair of intuitions is strongly supported, I think. The first is supported by the phenomenological observations in the previous section. If we were to take our experience completely at face value, we would accept that we were in a world where primitive properties such as perfect redness and perfect blueness are spread homogeneously over the surface of objects. The second is supported by our ordinary judgments about veridicality. When an ordinary white wall looks white to us, then even if it merely instantiates physical properties and no perfect whiteness, it is good enough to qualify as veridical by our ordinary standards.
These two intuitions need not be taken to contradict each other. Instead, they suggest that we possess two notions of satisfaction for an experience: perfect and imperfect veridicality. An experience can be imperfectly veridical, or veridical in the ordinary sense, without being perfectly veridical.
The terminology should not be taken to suggest that when an experience is imperfectly veridical, it is not really veridical. In fact, it is plausible that imperfect veridicality is the property that our ordinary term "veridicality" denotes. We speak truly when we say that a phenomenally red experience of an ordinary red object is veridical. It is just that the experience is not perfectly veridical. To capture this, one could also call imperfect veridicality "ordinary veridicality", or "veridicality simpliciter". Or one could use "veridical" for imperfect veridicality and "ultraveridical" for perfect veridicality. But I will usually stick to the terminology above.
Corresponding to these distinct notions of satisfaction, one will have distinct associated conditions of satisfaction. Imperfect veridicality will be associated with something like the Fregean condition of satisfaction discussed earlier: a phenomenally red experience will be perfectly veridical iff its object has the property that normally causes phenomenally red experiences. Perfect veridicality will be associated with the primitivist condition of satisfaction: a phenomenally red experience will be perfectly veridical iff its object instantiates perfect redness.
Imperfect and perfect veridicality can therefore be seen as associated with distinct contents of an experience. We might call the content associated with perfect veridicality the Edenic content of an experience, and the content associated with imperfect veridicality the ordinary content of the experience.
As we have already seen, our ordinary assessments of veridicality can be seen as associated with two contents in turn. For example, a phenomenally red experience has a Fregean content (satisfied iff its object has the property that normally causes phenomenally red experience) and a Russellian content (satisfied iff its object has physical redness). We might call these contents the ordinary Fregean content and the ordinary Russellian content of the experience.
One could also, in principle, associate assessments of perfect veridicality with both a Fregean and a Russellian content. But here the Fregean content is much the same as the Russellian content. The Russellian content involves the attribution of perfect redness: it is satisfied in a world iff the relevant object is perfectly red there. Unlike the ordinary Russellian content above, this content does not depend on how the subject's environment turns out. Regardless of how the environment turns out, the experience in question will attribute perfect redness. So there is no nontrivial dependence of the property attributed on the way the subject's environment turns out. It follows that the Edenic Fregean content of the experience (which captures the way that the perfect veridicality of the experience depends on the way the environment turns out) is satisfied iff the object of the experience has perfect redness. There may be some differences between the Edenic Fregean and Russellian contents here in the treatment of objects (as opposed to properties), and in the formal modeling (with worlds and centered worlds), but where the color-property aspect of the content is concerned, the contents behave in very similar ways. So for most purposes one can simply speak of the Edenic content of the experience, one that is satisfied iff a relevant object has perfect redness.[*]
*[[In terms of the two-dimensional framework, one can say that phenomenally red experiences (at the standard of perfect veridicality) are associated with the same primary and secondary intension. In this way they are reminiscent of expressions such as 'consciousness', 'philosopher', and 'two', which also arguably have the same primary and secondary intensions. These terms can be seen as "semantically neutral" (Chalmers forthcoming), as witnessed by the fact that their content does not seem to have the same sort of dependence on empirical discoveries about the environment as terms such as "water" and "Hesperus'. One might say that perceptual representations of perfect redness are semantically neutral in an analogous way.]]
So we have found three distinctive sorts of content associated with an experience: an Edenic content, an ordinary Fregean content, and an ordinary Russellian content. We have seen already that the ordinary Russellian content is not plausibly a phenomenal content: phenomenally identical experiences can have the same (ordinary) Russellian contents. However, for all we have said, both Edenic contents and ordinary Fregean contents are phenomenal contents. It is plausible that any phenomenally red experience will have the Fregean condition of satisfaction above (where satisfaction is understood as imperfect veridicality) and will have the primitivist condition of satisfaction above (where satisfaction is understood as perfect veridicality). So we have more than one phenomenal content for an experience, depending on the associated notion of satisfaction.
Perfect and imperfect veridicality are not independent of each other. It is plausible to suggest that there is an intimate relation between the two, and that there is an intimate relation between the associated sorts of phenomenal content.
A natural picture of this relation suggests itself. A phenomenally red experience is perfectly veridical iff its object instantiates perfect redness. A phenomenally red experience is imperfectly veridical iff its object instantiates a property that matches perfect redness. Here, to match perfect redness is (roughly) to play the role that perfect redness plays in Eden. The key role played by perfect redness in Eden is that it normally brings about phenomenally red experiences. So a property matches perfect redness if it normally causes phenomenally red experiences. This yields a condition of satisfaction that mirrors the ordinary Fregean content above.
The notion of matching is what links imperfect veridicality to perfect veridicality. I will say more about this notion later, but one can motivate the idea as follows. For our experiences to be perfectly veridical, we would have to live in Eden. But we have undergone the fall from Eden: no primitive color properties are instantiated by objects in our world. So the best that objects in our world can do is to have properties that can play the role that primitive properties play in Eden. Of course no property instantiated in our world can play that role perfectly, but some can play it well enough, by virtue of normally bringing about phenomenally red experiences. Such a property might be called imperfect redness. In our world, imperfect redness is plausibly some sort of physical property, such as a surface spectral reflectance.
More generally, the following is a plausible thesis. If an experience is such that its perfect veridicality conditions require the instantiation of primitive property X, then the experience's imperfect veridicality conditions will require the instantiation of a property that matches X. As before, a property matches X (roughly) if it plays the role that X plays in Eden. The key role is causing experiences of the appropriate phenomenal type. In our world, these properties will typically be physical properties: the imperfect counterparts of X.
This relation suggests the following two-stage picture of the phenomenal content of experience. On this picture, the most fundamental sort of content of an experience is its Edenic content, which requires the instantiation of appropriate primitive properties. This content then determines the ordinary Fregean content of the experience: the experience is imperfectly veridical if its object has properties that match the properties attributed by the experience's Edenic content.[*]
*[[Aaron Zimmerman suggested that instead of associating an experience two contents, we could associate an experience with a single graded content that has degrees of satisfaction: the content might be perfectly satisfied, imperfectly satisfied, and so on, depending on how the world turns out. A pluralist can allow that we can associate experiences with graded contents like these. However, this single graded content will lose some of the structure present in the dual contents: in particular, we cannot easily analyze it in terms of attribution of a property to objects in the environment, and the matching relation between Edenic and ordinary content will not easily be reflected in this account. So this picture will lose some of the explanatory structure that is present on the two-stage view.]]
On the two-stage view, the ordinary Fregean content of a phenomenally red experience will be satisfied (in an environment) iff a relevant object instantiates a property that matches perfect redness (in that environment). This ordinary Fregean content will itself be associated with an ordinary Russellian content: one that is satisfied iff the (actual) object of the experience has P, where P is the property that matches perfect redness in the environment of the original experience. On this view, all phenomenally red experiences will have the same Fregean content, but they may have different Russellian contents, depending on their environment.
Of course this Fregean content gives exactly the same results as the Fregean content discussed earlier: an object will instantiate a property that matches perfect redness iff it instantiates a property that normally causes phenomenally red experiences. But the two-stage view gives a more refined account of how this Fregean content is grounded, one that more clearly shows its roots in the phenomenology of the experience. The view also has the promise of being more phenomenologically adequate than the original Fregean view seemed to be, by giving a major role to the Edenic content that directly reflects the experience's phenomenology. One might call the resulting view a semi-primitivist Fregeanism: a version of the Fregean view on which the Fregean content is grounded in a primitivist Edenic content.
On this view, Eden acts as a sort of regulative ideal in determining the content of our color experiences. Our world is not Eden, but our perceptual experience requires our world to match Eden as well as possible. Eden is central to the content of our experience: it is directly reflected in the perfect veridicality conditions of the experience, and it plays a key role in determining the ordinary veridicality conditions of our experiences.
One might put the two-stage view as follows: our experience presents an Edenic world, and thereby represents an ordinary world. We might say that the perfect veridicality conditions of the experience are its presentational content, and the imperfect veridicality conditions of the experience are its representational content. As pluralists we can allow that experiences have both sorts of content, with an intimate relation between them. Presentational content most directly reflects the phenomenology of an experience; representational content most directly reflects its intuitive conditions of satisfaction.
Because of this the two-stage view yields natural answers to the objections to the Fregean view that were grounded in phenomenological adequacy. On the relationality objection: the two-stage view accommodates relationality by noting that there are certain specific and determinate properties — the perfect color properties — that are presented in virtue of the phenomenology of color experience. When Jack and Jill both have phenomenally green experiences in different environments, the two experiences have a common Edenic content, and so both are presented with perfect greenness. This captures the intuitive sense in which objects look to be the same to both Jack and Jill; at the same time, the level of ordinary Fregean and Russellian content captures the intuitive sense in which objects look to be different to both Jack and Jill. By acknowledging Edenic phenomenal content in addition to Fregean phenomenal content, we capture the sense in which perceptual phenomenology seems to be Russellian and relational.
On the simplicity objection: in the two-stage view, the simplicity of phenomenological structure is directly mirrored at the level of Edenic content. In Edenic content, there need be no reference to normal causes, and no reference to experiences: instead, simple properties are attributed directly. The residual question for the Fregean view concerned how a complex Fregean content might be grounded in simple phenomenology. The two-stage view begins to answer this question. A given experience is most directly associated with a simple Edenic content, and this Edenic content in then associated with a Fregean content by the invocation of the matching relation. There is still an explanatory question about just where the matching relation comes from, and how it might be grounded: I address this question later in the paper. But the two-stage view already gives us a skeleton around which we can build an explanatory connection between phenomenology and Fregean content.
On the internal unity objection: the two-stage view can accommodate the internal unity between visual and tactile experience of space by holding that the Edenic content of both visual and tactile experiences involve the attribution of perfect spatial properties (although the other perfect properties attributed by the experiences may differ). If so, then internal unity is present at the level of Edenic content. Further, the Fregean content of each will invoke the properties that match perfect spatial properties (in effect, the common typing of visual and spatial experiences in induced by the commonality in their Edenic content), and this common Fregean content will entail a common ordinary Russellian content. So the unity at the level of Edenic content will lead to unity at the level of ordinary content. Something similar applies to the case of representing the same color under different illumination; I will discuss this case in some detail shortly.
The two-stage view respects the insights of both the primitivist and the Fregean views in obvious ways. Like the original Fregean view, it can also respect certain key elements of dispositionalist and physicalist views. On the two-stage view, dispositions to cause relevant sorts of experiences still play a key role, not as the properties that are represented by experiences, but as a sort of reference-fixer for those properties. And the properties that are represented by the experience (at the standard of imperfect veridicality) are themselves plausibly physical properties, at least in the actual world. We might say that the view generates a broadly dispositionalist ordinary Fregean content and a broadly physicalist ordinary Russellian content.
As soon as this view is proposed, it naturally raises many questions. In the remainder of this paper I address some of these questions, and in doing so flesh out a number of aspects of the view. These include questions about Eden and Edenic content; about colors and color constancy; about matching and Fregean content; and about generalizing the model beyond the case of color. The order of these topics is arbitrary to some extent, so it is possible to skip to the topics that seem the most pressing.
What constraints are imposed by Edenic content?
A world with respect to which our visual experience is perfectly veridical is an Edenic world. (I defer until below the question of whether Edenic worlds are metaphysically possible.) It is natural to ask: what is the character of an Edenic world? A full answer to this question depends on a full analysis of the phenomenology of visual experience, which cannot be given here. But we can say a few things. As before, I will concentrate mostly on the aspects of phenomenology and representation associated with color, and will leave other aspects until later.
For any given experience, there will be many worlds with respect to which it is perfectly veridical. A visual experience — even a total visual experience corresponding to an entire visual field — typically makes quite limited claims on the world, and is neutral about the rest. For example, a visual experience typically presents things as being a certain way in a certain location, and is neutral about how things are outside that location. So strictly speaking, in order to make an experience perfectly veridical, a world need merely be Edenic in certain relevant respects in a certain relatively limited area, and maybe be quite non-Edenic outside that area. Correspondingly, there will be a very large range of worlds that satisfy the relevant Edenic content. But here we can focus on what is required in order that the content be satisfied.
In a world that satisfies a typical Edenic content, primitive color properties such as perfect redness and perfect blueness are instantiated. Most often, visual phenomenology presents color as instantiated on the surface of objects, so an Edenic world will contain objects in which perfect colors are instantiated at certain locations on their surfaces. Strictly speaking, it will contain objects with certain perfect location-color properties: properties of having certain perfect colors at certain locations. Occasionally we have the phenomenology of volumes of color: as with certain transparent colored objects, for example, or perhaps with smoke and flames. In these cases, the corresponding Edenic world will have objects in which the relevant perfect colors are instantiated at locations throughout the relevant volume. It may be that sometimes we have the phenomenology of color not associated with objects at all: perhaps our experience of the sky is like this, just representing blueness at a certain distance in front of us. If so, then a corresponding Edenic world will simply have perfect color qualities instantiated (by the world?) at relevant locations.[*]
*[[Clark (2000) suggests that visual experience always involves the mere attribution of colors to locations rather than to objects. I find this suggestion phenomenologically implausible, but if it is correct, one could accommodate it by saying that Edenic worlds involve the instantiation of color qualities by locations (or the instantiation of color-location properties by the world), without requiring any special relationship between these qualities and objects.]]
From the fable at the beginning of the paper, one might infer that Edenic worlds must meet a number of further constraints: perceivers must be directly acquainted with objects and properties in those worlds, illusion must be impossible, and there must be no microphysical structure. On my view this is not quite right, however. Edenic contents puts relatively simple constraints on the world, involving the instantiation of perfect properties by objects in the environment, and these further constraints are not part of Edenic content itself. Their relation to Edenic content is somewhat more subtle than this.
Perfect color properties are plausibly intrinsic color properties. By virtue of presenting an object as having a perfect color at a certain location, an experience does not seem to make claims about how things are outside that location. So when an object is perfectly red in Eden, it is this way in virtue of its intrinsic nature. In particular, it seems that an object can be perfectly red without anyone experiencing the object as perfectly red. The phenomenology of color does not seem to be the phenomenology of properties that require a perceiver in order to be instantiated. (The phenomenology of pain is arguably different in this respect, as I will discuss later.) It seems coherent to suppose that there is a world in which perfect colors are instantiated, but in which there are no perceivers at all.
One could hold a view on which for an experience to be perfectly veridical, a subject must perceive the relevant perfect colors. On such a view, the character of visual experience is such that in addition to representing the presence of colors, visual experiences also represent the perception of colors. If one held this, one would hold that no such experience is perfectly veridical unless the relevant perfect colors are perceived by a subject (the subject at the center of the relevant centered world), perhaps by direct acquaintance.
I am inclined to think that the character of visual experience is not like this, however. The phenomenology of color vision clearly makes claims about objects in the world, but it does not obviously make claims about ourselves and our perceptual relation to these objects. As theorists who introspect and reflect on how our phenomenology seems, we can say that on reflection it seems to us (introspectively) as if we are acquainted with objects and properties in the world. But it is not obvious that perceptual phenomenology itself makes such a claim: to suggest that it does is arguably to overintellectualize perceptual experience. If perceptual experience does not make such claims, then the Edenic content of a visual experience will require that the relevant perfect properties are instantiated, but they will not require that we stand in any particular perceptual relation to those properties.
If this is correct, then in order to satisfy the Edenic content of an experience, a world must be Edenic in that perfect properties are instantiated within it, but it need not be a world in which we have not yet eaten from the Tree of Illusion. If an experience does not represent itself, it does not represent that it is nonillusory. Likewise, a world that satisfies the Edenic content of an experience need not be one in which we have not yet eaten from the Tree of Science. The phenomenology of vision is arguably quite neutral on whether the world has the relevant scientific structure, as long as it also has primitive properties, and there is no obvious reason why a possible world could not have both.
To reinforce this view, we can note that the argument from the existence of illusions and of scientific structure to the nonexistence of perfect colors in our world was not a deductive argument. Rather, it was a sort of abductive argument: it undercut our reasons for accepting (instantiated) perfect colors, by suggesting that they are not needed to explain our visual experience. It remained coherent to suppose that primitive properties are instantiated in our world, but there was now good reason to reject the hypothesis as unnecessarily complex. On this view, eating from the Trees (by discovering the existence of illusions and scientific structure) did not directly contradict the Edenic contents of our experience, but it gave us good reason to believe that our world is not an Edenic world.
A more complete account of the Edenic content of color experience would require careful attention to all sorts of phenomenological details that I have largely ignored so far, such as the phenomenal representation of the distribution of colors in space, the fineness of grain of color representation, the different levels of detail of color experience in the foreground and background of a visual field, and so on. I cannot do all of this here, but as a case study, I will pay attention to one such detail, the phenomenon of color constancy, a little later in this paper.
What is the character of Edenic perception?
Even if perceivers are not presented in the Edenic content of an experience, it is natural to speculate about how perception might work in an Edenic world. One way to put this is to ask: what sort of world maximally reflects how things seem to us both perceptually and introspectively? Even if perception makes no claims about our perceptual experiences and our perceptual relation to the world, introspection does. It seems to us, introspectively and perceptually, as if we stand in certain sorts of relation to the world. For this seeming to be maximally veridical, an Edenic world must contain subjects who stand in certain intimate relations to perfect properties in the world. We can call a world in which these seemings are maximally veridical a pure Edenic world.
Of course there are (possibly impure) Edenic worlds in which subjects perceive perfect colors via a mediated causal mechanism, at least to the extent that we perceive imperfect colors via such a mechanism in our world. But it is natural to think that this is not the best that they could do. It seems reasonable to hold that in Eden, subjects could have a sort of direct acquaintance with perfect colors. Perfect colors seem to be the sort of properties that are particularly apt for direct acquaintance, after all. And phenomenologically, there is something to be said for the claim that we seem to perceive colors directly. Certainly there does not seem to be a mediating causal mechanism, and one could suggest more strongly that at least introspectively, there seems not to be a mediating causal mechanism.
It is natural to suggest that in the purest Edenic worlds, subjects do not perceive instances of perfect color by virtue of having color experiences that are distinct from but related to those instances. That would seem to require a contingent mediating connection. Instead, Edenic subjects perceive instances of perfect colors by standing in a direct perceptual relation to them: perhaps the relation of acquaintance. Edenic subjects still have color experiences: there is something it is like to be them. But their color experiences have their phenomenal character precisely in virtue of the perfect colors that the subject is acquainted with. It is natural to say that the experiences themselves are constituted by a direct perceptual relation to the relevant instances of perfect color in the environment.[*] We might say: in Eden, if not in our world, perceptual experience extends outside the head.
*[[Is Edenic perception causal? Given that a perceptual experience consists in a relation of acquaintance with a perfect color property, is its character causally related to the perfect color property? This depends on subtle questions about the causation of relational properties by their relata. Compare: when a boy's first sibling is born, does this sibling cause the boy to be a brother? I am inclined to say yes, and to say the same thing about Edenic perception, holding that it involves a sort of unmediated causal relation. One could also say no, saying that this is a constitutive relation that is stronger than any causal relation. But even if so, there will at least be a counterfactual dependence of perceptual experience on perfect color properties in the world, by virtue of the constitutive relation.]]
In the purest Edenic worlds, there are no illusions (if we take both introspection and perception to be maximally veridical, we conclude that things are just as they seem). In such a world, and all color experience involves direct acquaintance with instances of perfect color in the environment. As soon as we eat from the Tree of Illusion, we have good reason to believe that we are not in such a world. But this need not cast us out of Eden entirely. There are somewhat less pure Edenic worlds in which there are illusions and hallucinations: perceivers sometimes have experiences as of perfect redness when the perceived object is perfectly blue, or when there is no object to be perceived. In these cases, the color experience cannot consist in a direct perceptual relation to an instance of perfect redness, as the subject stands in no such relation. Instead, it seems that the character of the experience is constituted independently of the properties of the perceived object.
In these impure Edenic worlds, an illusory or hallucinatory color experience involves a relevant relation to the property of perfect redness, without this relation being mediated by a relation to this instance. (Something like this view is suggested as an account of hallucination in the actual world by Johnston 2004.) If so, then in such a world there may be phenomenally identical experiences (say, veridical and nonveridical phenomenally red experiences) whose underlying metaphysical nature is quite distinct: one is constituted by a perceptual relation to a property instance in the subject's environment, and one is not. This picture is reminiscent of that held by some disjunctivists about perceptual experience in our world. We might say that in Eden, if not in our world, a disjunctive view of the metaphysics of perceptual experience is correct.
Is Eden a possible world?
Eden does not exist, but could it have existed? That is, is there a possible world in which there are perfect colors? Could God, if he had so chosen, have created such a world?
I am not certain of the answer to this question. But I am inclined to say yes: there is an Edenic possible world.
To start with, it seems that perceptual experience gives us some sort of grip on what it would be for an object to be perfectly red, or perfectly blue. It would have to be exactly like that, precisely as that object is presented to us as being in experience. It seems that we can use this grip to form concepts of qualities such as perfect redness and perfect blueness (I have been deploying these concepts throughout this paper). And there is no obvious incoherence in the idea that an object could be perfectly red, or perfectly blue. On the face of it we can conceive of such an object. So there is a prima facie case for believing that such an object is possible.
One can also reason as follows. There are good reasons to think that perfect redness is not instantiated in our world. But these reasons are empirical reasons, not a priori reasons. It was eating from the Tree of Illusion and the Tree of Science that led us to doubt that we live in an Edenic world. And eating from these Trees was an empirical process, based on empirical discoveries about the world. Before eating from these Trees, there was no special reason to doubt that our experience was perfectly veridical. In particular, it is hard to see how one could be led to the conclusion that perfect redness is not instantiated by a priori reasoning alone (although see below). So the hypothesis that our world is Edenic is seems at least to be conceivable, and it is reasonable to suggest that it cannot be ruled out a priori.
I have argued elsewhere (Chalmers 2002b) that this sort of conceivability is a good guide to metaphysical possibility. In particular, there is good reason to believe that if a hypothesis is ideally negatively conceivable, in that it cannot be ruled out by idealized a priori reasoning, then there is a metaphysically possible world that verifies the hypothesis. And there is even better reason to believe that if a hypothesis is ideally positively conceivable, in that one can imagine a situation in which the hypothesis actually obtains (in a way that holds up on idealized a priori reflection), then there is a metaphysically possible world that verifies the hypothesis.
The hypothesis that our world is Edenic (that is, that perfect colors are instantiated in our world) seems to be at least prima facie negatively conceivable (it can't easily be ruled out a priori) and prima facie positively conceivable (we can imagine that it actually obtains). Furthermore, it is not clear how this hypothesis could be undercut by further a priori reasoning. If it cannot, then the hypothesis is ideally (negatively and positively) conceivable. If so, and if the thesis above is correct, then there is a metaphysically possible world that verifies the hypothesis. Verification is a technical notion from two-dimensional semantics (verification goes with primary intensions, satisfaction with secondary intensions), but the technicalities do not matter too much in this case (the primary and secondary intensions of perfect color concepts are plausibly identical, so that if a world verifies the hypothesis that perfect colors are instantiated it also satisfies the hypothesis). So if this reasoning is correct, one can simply say: it is metaphysically possible that perfect colors are instantiated.
One could resist the conclusion either by denying that the Edenic hypothesis is conceivable in the relevant senses, or by denying the connection between conceivability in the relevant senses and possibility. Speaking for myself, I am reasonably confident about the latter, but I am not certain about the former. I do not see any obvious way of ruling out the Edenic hypothesis a priori, but I cannot be sure that there is no such way. (We will see that in the case of perfect pains, discussed below, there is arguably such a way. These considerations do not generalize to perfect colors, but they make salient the possibility that other considerations might.) So for now, I am inclined to think that an Edenic world is metaphysically possible, but I am not certain of this.
Is there a property of perfect redness?
If what I have said so far is right, there is no instantiated property of perfect redness, but it is natural to hold that perfect redness may be an uninstantiated property. It seems that we have a grip on such a property in experience: we grasp what it would be for an object to have the property of perfect redness. Certainly if an Edenic world is metaphysically possible, then objects in those worlds will be perfectly red, and it seems reasonable to conclude that they have the property of perfect redness. And even if an Edenic world is metaphysically impossible, one might still hold that there is such a property: it is just a necessarily uninstantiated property (like the property of being a round square). These issues will interact with one's views on the metaphysics of properties to some extent: for example, if one thinks that properties are just sets of possible objects, or if one thinks that properties are very sparse relative to predicates, one might resist some of the reasoning here. But overall I think there is a good prima facie case for thinking that there is a property of perfect redness.
If there is no such property, or if there is no metaphysically possible Edenic world, then some of the details in this paper might have to change. If there is no metaphysically possible Edenic world, one cannot model the conditions of satisfaction association with perfect veridicality using sets of (or functions over) metaphysically possible worlds. And if there is no property of perfect redness, one cannot say that there is a content that attributes this property to an object. But even if so, one could understand the contents in other terms. For example, one could understand Edenic contents in terms of sets of epistemically possible scenarios rather than metaphysically possible worlds. Or one could understand Edenic conditions of satisfaction using something like Fregean concepts rather than properties. One could also regard Eden as some sort of mere world-model, not yet a possible world, but one that plays a key role in determining the ordinary Fregean contents of perception, via the requirement that the actual world must match the world-model in various respects. In this fashion numerous key elements of the two-stage model of perceptual content could be preserved.
If there is a property of perfect redness, what sort of property is it? It is most natural to conceive of perfect redness as a sort of simple, irreducible quality, one that might be instantiated on the surface of objects in some possible world. Perfect color properties might not all be maximally simple. For example, they might be seen as a sort of composition from simpler perfect properties, such as certain perfect unique hues (so that a particular shade of perfect orange may be a composite of perfect redness and perfect yellowness to certain degrees, and certain amount of perfect brightness). But the underlying properties are naturally held to be irreducible.
In particular, it is natural to hold that perfect colors are not reducible to physical properties. If one accepts the earlier arguments that perfect color properties are not instantiated in our world, this consequence follows naturally. But even if one thought that perfect color properties are instantiated in our world, one could still argue that they are irreducible to physical properties, by analogs of familiar arguments concerning phenomenal properties.[*] For example one could argue that one can conceive of a physically identical world in which they are not instantiated, and infer that such a world is metaphysically possible. Or one could argue that someone without color vision could know all about the physical properties of objects without knowing about their perfect colors.
*[[Analog arguments of this sort are discussed in detail by Byrne (forthcoming). Byrne conceives these arguments as arguments for the irreducibility of color properties. I think the arguments work best as arguments for the irreducibility of perfect color properties.]]
Still, it is at least coherent to hold a view on which experiences have Edenic content that represents the instantiation of perfect color properties, and to hold that as a matter of empirical fact, perfect color properties are identical to certain physical properties (such as surface reflectances). On this view, our concepts of perfect color properties may be simple and irreducible concepts, but they pick out the same properties as those picked out by certain physical properties. Such a view would be analogous to certain "type-B" materialist views about phenomenal properties, according to which phenomenal properties are empirically identical to certain physical properties, because simple phenomenal concepts pick out the same properties as certain physical concepts. On the resulting view, experiences could be seen to have a Russellian phenomenal content that represents the instantiation of certain physical properties (although the experience does not represent these properties as physical properties). On this sort of view, our experiences might be perfectly veridical even in a purely physical world. I do not find this view plausible myself: it is vulnerable to the usual objects to Russellian physicalist views based on inversion scenarios, for example (requiring either strong externalism about phenomenology or arbitrary asymmetries among inverted communities), and it is also subject to the conceivability arguments above. But I think that there is at least an interesting variety of Russellian physicalism about phenomenal content in the vicinity.[*]
*[[The version of Russellian physicalism about phenomenal content advocated by Byrne and Hilbert (2003) may be particularly close to this view.]]
One could likewise hold a view on which perfect color properties are empirically identical to certain dispositional properties. Or one could hold a view on which perfect color properties are distinct from physical and dispositional properties, but on which they metaphysically supervene on such properties.[*] These views will be confronted with familiar problems: e.g. the question of how to individuate the properties while still retaining plausible results about veridicality and illusion (for the view on which perfect colors are identical to or supervene on dispositional properties), and the questions of inversion and conceivability (for the view on which perfect colors supervene on intrinsic physical properties). But again, views of this sort are at least worth close attention.
*[[The views of Campbell 1993 and McGinn 1996 are at least closely related to the views on which perfect color properties supervene on intrinsic physical properties (for Campbell) and on dispositional properties (for McGinn).]]
Finally, it is possible to hold that perfect color properties are identical to certain mental properties, such as properties instantiated by one's visual field. This view agrees with the ordinary Edenic view that perfect colors are not instantiated by ordinary external objects, but holds that they are instantiated by certain mental objects (though they need not be represented as mental properties). The resulting view, a version of projectivism, does not suffer from the problems for the physicalist and dispositionalist views outlined above.[*] I am inclined to reject this view myself, because of familiar problems with holding that mental objects instantiate color properties or their analogs (Chisholm's (1942) "speckled hen" problem, for example), and because the view becomes particularly hard to accept when extending beyond the case of color (it is hard to accept that mental objects instantiate perfect height, for example, of the sort that we represent in spatial experience). But the question of whether perfect properties might be instantiated in mental objects is at least well worth considering, and the corresponding version of projectivism might be able to accommodate many of the features of the two-stage view that I have been advocating.
*[[The projectivist view of color defended by Boghossian and Velleman (1989) seems to be compatible with an Edenic view on which the perfect color properties are instantiated by a visual field.]]
For the remainder of this paper, I will assume that perfect color properties are irreducible properties that are not instantiated in our world. But at least some aspects of the discussion may generalize to the other views I have outlined.
How can we represent perfect redness?
If perfect redness is never instantiated in our world, then we have never had contact with any instances of it. If so, one might wonder: how can perfect redness be represented in the content of our experiences?
Construed as an objection, this point turns on the tacit premise that representing a property requires contact with instances of it. In reply, one can note that we can certainly represent other uninstantiated properties (the property of being phlogistonated, Hume's missing shade of blue), and can even represented uninstantiable properties (being a round square). An opponent might suggest that these are complex properties whose representation derives from the representation of simpler properties, and so might suggest the modified premise that representing a simple property requires contact with instances of it. It is far from clear why we should accept this, however. For example, there seem to be perfectly coherent Humean views of causation on which we represent the simple property (or relation) of causation in our experience and in our thought, but in which there is no causation present in the world.
Certainly, there are cases in which representing a property crucially depends on contact with instances of it. But there many cases of representation that do not work like this. One can plausibly represent the property of being a philosopher without being acquainted with any philosophers. The same goes for causation, on the Humean view above. One might divide representations into those that are subject to Twin Earth thought experiments (so that twins in a different environment would represent different properties), and those that are not. Representations in the first class (including especially the representation of natural kinds such as water) may have content that depends on instantiation of the relevant property in the environment. But representations in the second class (including perhaps representations of philosophers and causation, at least if this representation does not involve deference to a surrounding linguistic community) do not depend on instances of the property in this way. In these cases, representation of a property comes not from instances of that property in the environment, but rather from some sort of internal grasp of what it would take for something to instantiate the property. It is plausible that representation of perfect redness falls into this second class.
Of course to say this much is just to respond to the objection, and not to fully answer the question. The residual question concerns just how our mental states get to have a given Edenic content. I will not try to answer this question here. We do not yet have a good theory of how our mental states represent any properties at all, and the cases of "narrow" representation, such as the representation of philosophers and causation above, are particularly ill-understood. To properly answer these questions, and the analogous question about Edenic content, requires a theory of the roots of intentionality.
I would speculate, however, that the roots of Edenic content lie deep in the heart of phenomenology itself. Horgan and Tienson (2002) have suggested that there is a distinctive sort of "phenomenal intentionality" that is grounded in phenomenology, rather than being grounded in extrinsic causal connections. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Edenic content is a basic sort of phenomenal intentionality: perhaps even the most basic sort. This could be combined with a variety of views about the metaphysics of phenomenal intentionality. For example, one could hold that such intentionality is grounded in the projection of properties of certain mental objects, as on the projectivist view above. Or one could hold that that the representation of Edenic content is even more primitive than this. Especially if one is inclined to think that there is something irreducible about phenomenology, one might naturally hold that perceptual phenomenology simply consists in certain primitive relations to certain primitive properties: the presentation of perfect redness, for example. In any case, it is likely that understanding the roots of Edenic content will be closely tied to understanding the metaphysics of phenomenology.
What about color constancy?
Color constancy is the phenomenon wherein instances of the same color in the environment, when illuminated by quite different sorts of lighting so that they reflect different sorts of light, nevertheless seem to have the same color. A paradigmatic example is a shadow: when we see a surface that is partly in shadow, although there is something different about the appearance of the shadowed portion of the surface, it often does not seem to us as if the object has a different color in the shadowed portion. One might say: although there is a sense in which the shadowed and unshadowed portions look different, there is also a sense in which they look the same. Certainly, the shadowed and unshadowed portions produce phenomenally distinct experiences, but we often do not judge that the object has a different color in those areas.
To say this much is to stay neutral on the representational content of the relevant experience. But it is natural to wonder just how the content of such experiences should be analyzed. In particular, it is natural to wonder how the two-stage model can handle such contents. To address this question, one can ask as before: how would the world have to be, in order for experiences of this sort to be perfectly veridical? A definite answer to this question requires a close phenomenological analysis. I will not give a full analysis, but I will outline some options.
It is useful to focus on the case of shadows. As an example, we can take a white floor on which an object casts a crisp dark shadow. I will take it that there are visual cues indicating that a shadow is being cast, so that we judge that the floor is still white at the relevant point, though we also judge that it is in shadow. What is the content of this experience? How would the world have to be, in order for the experience to be perfectly veridical?
The answer depends on how we analyze the phenomenology of the experience. To start, one might take either a simple or a complex view of the phenomenology. On the simple view, the apparent sameness in color between the shadowed and unshadowed area is not present in visual phenomenology at all. Rather, the sameness is detected only at the level of visual judgment, or perhaps at the level of earlier perceptual mechanisms whose contents are not reflected in phenomenology. For simplicity, let us say it is at the level of visual judgment. On this view, the phenomenal character of the experience of the floor may be the same as the phenomenal character of a floor where the relevant portion of the floor is painted the relevant shade of gray, and in which the floor is under constant illumination; it might also be the same as in a case where the floor is in shadow in the relevant portion, but where there are no cues. (We can stipulate that the last two cases involve exactly the same retinal stimulation, so that there is not much doubt that they are phenomenally identical to each other.) On the simple view, the original shadow case will differ merely in that relevant cues lead to a judgment of sameness in that case but not in the others. The simple view will say something similar about all cases of color constancy: the constancy is present at the level of judgment, not at the level of perceptual experience.
The simple view is naturally associated with a view on which the local phenomenology of color experience is three-dimensional: the relevant experiences can be arranged in a three-dimensional color solid that exhausts the relevant dimensions of variation. Or at least it will hold that if there are further dimensions of variation, then variations due to shadows, illumination, and so on are not among them. On this view, the local phenomenology of perceiving the shadow will be the same as the local phenomenology of veridically perceiving an unshadowed object that is a relevant shade of grey. It is natural to hold that the Edenic content of such an experience involves the attribution of perfect greyness. So on this view, the perfect veridicality of a shadow experience will require the instantiation of the relevant shade of perfect greyness in the object of perception. If we accept the simple view, then if a shadow is cast in a pure Edenic world (one without illusion), the color of the object will change.
On the simple view, what are the imperfect veridicality conditions of such an experience? An experience of the shadow will be correct iff the floor instantiates a property that matches perfect greyness. A property matches perfect greyness, to a first approximation, if it normally causes phenomenally grey experiences. If we take it that there is a canonical normal condition that involves unshadowed light, then this property will be something like a certain specific surface reflectance that the shadowed area of the floor does not instantiate, so the experience will be (imperfectly) nonveridical. If we allow that there is a wide range of normal conditions that includes both shadowed and unshadowed light, things are more complicated. I will discuss this further in the next section.
One other position compatible with the simple view holds that while the local phenomenology of seeing the partially shadowed floor is the same as the local phenomenology of seeing a partially grey floor without cues, the global phenomenology of the two cases is different (because of the difference in cues), and this difference in global phenomenology makes for a difference in conditions of veridicality. This view requires a certain anti-atomism about perceptual content: the veridicality conditions of an experience of a color at a location are not determined just by the local phenomenology associated with the location, but by the phenomenology of the entire visual experience. That is: two experiences can have the same local phenomenology but different local content, due to different global phenomenology. This view leads to a complicated further range of options about perceptual content, on some of which the shadow experience may end up being (imperfectly) veridical. These options end up roughly mirroring the options for the complex view that follows (which also postulates differences in local content, this time associated with differences in local phenomenology), so I will not discuss it further.
The alternative to the simple view is the complex view, on which the apparent sameness in color between the shadowed and unshadowed areas is present in some fashion in the visual phenomenology of seeing the floor. On this view, the experience of seeing the partially shadowed floor is phenomenally different from the experience of seeing a partially grey floor under uniform lighting, and the phenomenal difference is present in the visual phenomenology associated with the floor itself (and not merely in the experience of background cues). On this view, the presence or absence of cues makes a difference to the visual experience of the floor itself: one might say that the cues play a pre-experiential role and not just a pre-judgmental role.
This view is naturally associated with a view on which the local phenomenology of color experience is more than three-dimensional. For the sameness is accommodated in visual phenomenology, it is natural to hold that the color contents associated with the shadowed and unshadowed areas are in some respect the same. If local phenomenology were three-dimensional, and if differences in local content go along with differences in local phenomenology (the alternative that rejects this collapses into the anti-atomistic version of the simple view above), then this sameness in local content entails that the local phenomenology of seeing the shadowed and unshadowed white regions is exactly the same. That claim is not phenomenologically plausible. So the complex view suggests that the local phenomenology of seeing color has more than three relevant dimensions of variation, with correspondingly more dimensions of variation in representational content.
On this view, the shadowed and unshadowed area will be represented as being the same in some respect: intuitively, both will be represented as white. They will also be represented as being different in some respect: intuitively, one will be represented as being in shadow and one will not. And these respects of sameness and difference will both be present in the phenomenology. One can argue that this view is more phenomenologically attractive than the simple view, in allowing phenomenological and representational differences between seeing something as shadowed white and as unshadowed white, on the one hand, and between seeing something as shadowed white and as unshadowed grey, on the other. I am inclined to favor the complex view over the simple view for this reason, although I think that the correct characterization of the phenomenology is far from obvious and neither view is obviously correct or incorrect.
If the complex view is correct, what should we say about the Edenic content of an experience of shadowed white? Phenomenologically, such an experience seems to characterize the intrinsic properties of a surface: if one takes the experience completely at face value, there seems to be an intrinsic (although perhaps temporary) difference between the shadowed and unshadowed parts of the floor. So it is natural to say that the Edenic content of the experience attributes a complex intrinsic property to the floor. One might see this property as the conjunction of two intrinsic properties: roughly, perfect whiteness and perfect shadow. That is, the Edenic content presents the floor as being perfectly white, infused in the relevant areas with a perfect shadow. This conjunctive treatment of perfect shadowed white is not mandatory: one could see the property as a certain mode of perfect white, rather than as a conjunction of perfect white with an independent perfect shadow property. But the conjunctive proposal has a certain phenomenological plausibility, insofar as one can see differently colored areas as subject to the same sort of shadow.
On this view, perfect shadows are things that can come and go in Eden, while the perfect color of an object stays the same. When a perfect shadow is cast on a perfectly white object, the shadow is on the object in the sense that it affects the intrinsic nature of the object's surface. Of course there are different sorts of shadows, corresponding to different degrees of shadowing, each of which can come and go while an object's perfect color stays the same. Strictly speaking, it is best to talk of shadow properties instantiated at locations on objects, rather than talking of shadows: while we sometimes have the phenomenology of seeing shadows as objects, it is arguable that more often we do not.
One might worry that this view cannot adequately capture the dimension of sameness between shadowed white and unshadowed grey. There is a clear respect in which these experiences are phenomenally similar, and one might argue that this respect corresponds to a representational similarity: perhaps one could say that the objects of such experience seem the same with respect to superficial color, or something along those lines. The representational claim is not obviously mandatory here, but if one accepts it, one might elaborate the Edenic model by saying that there is a respect in which any objects with perfect shadowed white and perfect unshadowed grey are similar to each other. One might say that both of these perfect properties entail perfect superficial greyness, for example. This might either be seen as a composite property, or simply as corresponding to another way of carving up the underlying multidimensional space.
What are the imperfect veridicality conditions of such an experience? Presumably an experience as of shadowed white is veridical iff its object has a property that matches perfect shadowed white; or on the conjunctive treatment of shadowed white, iff it has a property that matches perfect white and a property that matches perfect shadow. The former is plausible a physical property such as a certain surface reflectance (although see below). As for the latter, it will be a property that normally causes experiences as of the appropriate sort of shadow. It seems that no intrinsic property of surfaces is a good candidate here. Rather, the reasonable candidates are all relational: for example, the property of being subject to the occlusion of a light source to a relevant degree in the relevant area. This is a relational property rather than an intrinsic property, so it does not match the property of perfect shadow as well as it could. But with no intrinsic property even a candidate, it seems that this property may match well enough. If so, then we can say the experience is imperfectly veridical iff the object has the relevant physical property (imperfect whiteness) and the relevant relational property (imperfect shadow). If it has one but not the other, one can say that the experience is imperfectly veridical in one respect but not the other.
One can extend something like this treatment to other cases of color constancy, and to cases of variation in illumination in general. One might hold that whenever there are relevant cues about illumination, these make a difference to the complex phenomenology of an experience with a corresponding difference in content. If the perceptual system is doing its job, then the object will be represented as having the same color, but it will also be represented as being different in some relevant respect, analogous to the presence or absence of shadows earlier. The difference in phenomenology seems to involve a difference in intrinsic (if temporary) properties, so the associated Edenic properties are intrinsic: one might call them perfect illumination properties (with the recognition that perfect illumination is intrinsic rather than extrinsic). There will plausibly have a complex space of such perfect illumination properties, perhaps a three-dimensional space, and a corresponding space of matching imperfect properties (which may once again be relational properties, such as the property of being illuminated by certain sorts of light. Once we consider color and illumination together, one will plausibly have at least a six-dimensional space of complex Edenic properties in the vicinity, and a corresponding space of imperfect physical/relational properties.
One might wonder about the experience of darkness. What happens in Eden, if darkness falls? I am inclined to say that darkness is in some respects like the experience of shadow, but more all-pervasive. In particular, as darkness falls, darkness seems to pervade the environment, present at every location. The whole space appears to become dark. Objects do not seem to change their colors, exactly, although the representation of their colors may become much less specific, and it eventually becomes absent altogether (as does the representation of objects, in pitch blackness). So it is natural to say: in Eden, when things become dark, perfect darkness is present throughout the relevant volume of space, intrinsically altering that volume, although it need not alter objects' colors. In Eden, when darkness falls, perfect darkness pervades.
What are imperfect colors?
The imperfect colors are the properties that match the perfect colors (in our world), and whose instantiation or non-instantiation makes our color experiences veridical or nonveridical. Just which properties are these? So far, I have said that these are the intrinsic physical properties that serve as the normal cause of experiences with the corresponding phenomenal properties. A first approximation suggests that these may be certain surface reflectance properties, or better, the categorical bases of the relevant surface reflectance dispositions. But there are some tricky issues.
One tricky issue, stressed by Hardin (1987), arises from the fact that there is no such thing as a canonical normal condition for the perception of colors. Instead there is a wide range of normal conditions, including bright sunlight, muted cloudy light, shaded light, and so on. For a given subject, the same object may cause experiences with different phenomenal characters in each of these conditions. So it is not obvious that there will be any specific physical property that can be singled out as the "normal cause" of a given phenomenal character property.[*]
*[[Hardin (1987) also stresses variations between normal perceivers, as well as variations in normal conditions. Variations between normal perceivers are no pr