Mental Representation and Consciousness

Mental Representation and Consciousness

Mental Representation and Consciousness D D Hutto, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK ã 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Glossary Enact...

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Mental Representation and Consciousness D D Hutto, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK ã 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Enactivism – The view that experiences are not inner events but are constituted by the activity of organisms engaging or interacting with some environment or other. Mode of presentation – The manner or aspect under which an individual, object or state of affairs is apprehended by a thinker or subject. Modes of presentation are thought to be the basis of cognitive mediation. Narrow content – A kind of content that is nonrelational and dependent only on the local, portable properties of psychological individuals. Phenomenal character – The distinctive quality associated with token experiences (perceptions, sensations, feelings, moods); what-it-is-like to undergo such experiences. Phenomenal consciousness – Subjective states of mind that involve having experiences with specific phenomenal characters. Strong representationalism – The claim that the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by, identical with, or entirely determined by representational content or properties. Subjectivity – The property of being an experience for something or of someone, often equated with the having of an idiosyncratic first-personal point of view, or perspective. Supervenience – A nonreductive relation of covariance holding between specified relata (concepts, properties, entities, etc.). Supervenience relations are generally believed to involve asymmetric dependence or determination. Accordingly, if ‘x’ and ‘y’ properties exist, such that ‘y’ depends on or is determined by ‘x’ then any relevant change in ‘x’ also incurs a change in ‘y.’ For example, aesthetic properties are thought by some to depend on physical properties, such that

modifying an object’s material aspects in relevant ways would automatically modify its aesthetic aspects, that is, enhancing or marring its beauty. Supervenience relations can vary in their modal force (as reflected by operators such as ‘necessity’ and ‘possibility’) and scope. Weak representationalism – The claim that experiential facts are, or supervene on, representational facts. Wide (or broad) content – Content that is necessarily individuated by environmental factors, or kinds that exist outside the bounds of subjects or organisms.

Introduction Intentionality and consciousness are the fundamental kinds of mental phenomena. Although they are widely regarded as being entirely distinct some philosophers conjecture that they are intimately related. Prominently it has been claimed that consciousness can be best understood in terms of representational facts or properties. Representationalist theories vary in strength. At their core they seek to establish that subjective, phenomenal consciousness (of the kind that involves the having of first-personal points of view or perspectives on the world – perspectives that incorporate experiences with specific phenomenal characters) is either exhausted by, or supervenes on, capacities for mental representation. These proposals face several serious objections.

Intentionality and Mental Representation Intentionality and consciousness are the most fundamental and philosophically interesting kinds of

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mental phenomena. Explaining how they fit into the world order poses powerful (and some think insuperable) challenges for naturalists who rely exclusively on the resources of hard sciences for prosecuting that task. Intentionality is the capacity to have thoughts, feelings, and other states of mind that are about, or directed at, particular worldly offerings and states of affairs. Examples include having the thought that ‘‘It is going to rain’’; harboring a desire for strong coffee, or seeing that the leaves have changed color. Building on the foundations laid down by early modern thinkers, some contemporary philosophers hold that the capacity to be in such states of mind is best explained by the having of inner mental representations with specific truth-apt contents. At the very least, it is accepted that mental representations form a subclass of intentional phenomena. Mental representations are distinct from ordinary representations. The latter are familiar public items of our everyday acquaintance. They include such things as drawings, maps, and natural language statements. Mental representations are modeled in weaker or stronger ways on these pedestrian entities and are thought to have similar properties and functions. They aim to say how things stand with the world. If they speak truly they can inform their users of the state of the world, successfully guiding their behavior and actions (or at least they can do this when they combine appropriately with conative states). Minimally, something is a mental representation if it presents some portion of the world as being a certain way; for example as ‘being hot’ or ‘being colored.’ The world may of course vary from the way it is presented as being: things are not always as they seem. Importantly, mental representations can be entirely nonconceptual and still be regarded as having content. A mental state will have content and be representational in character if it has correctness conditions that are specifiable, in principle. Conceptual and nonconceptual content are thus thought to be equally representational in nature; they are distinguished only in the way that they represent. Representing aspects of the world necessarily invokes correctness conditions. Although some philosophers have argued that certain types of

representations are immune to error – such as the necessary truths of logic or mathematics – the existence and status of such truths, and whether they take the form of genuine propositions, is a matter of controversy. It is generally accepted that naturally occurring representations that say how things stand with a changing world – for example, those of the perceptual sort – always entail a risk of error or misrepresentation. Explaining how this could be so is taken to be a primary condition of adequacy for naturalistic theories of mental content. Acknowledging this, it is almost universally agreed that a stronger condition on what it is to be a representation, is warranted. Something is a representation if and only if it presents some portion of the world as being in a certain truthevaluable way. As such, specific representations target aspects of the world, saying how things might be. Propositions expressed by well-formed sentences of natural language remain the clearest and least controversial models of contentful representations. Propositions must in some sense correspond to, or otherwise incorporate, the states of affairs that they represent. What this involves and what propositions are comes out differently on different analyses. For example, Russellian propositions are purely extensional; they include objects or individuals that are thought of as constituents of propositions themselves. Such propositions have the property of being true or false, but they do not do so in virtue of corresponding to anything beyond themselves. In contrast Fregeans hold that propositions have both intensional and extensional aspects. This idea is embodied in Frege’s famous distinction between sense and reference. Intensional content, or Fregean sense, can be understood as the way or manner in which the referent in question is presented to, or apprehended by, the subject. Famous examples include the different senses of the proper names Hesperus and Phosphorus. Although these names denote the same planet, Venus, they have different connotations; one labels it ‘the morning star’ and the other ‘the evening star.’ As such they have the potential to evoke different thoughts in their respondents. For Frege all genuinely referring names and whole propositions were thought

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to have intensional contents, which had to be understood in aspectual terms. Following Frege such contents and their analogues in contemporary theories of representation are commonly known as modes of presentation. Whereas Frege rejected standard correspondence theories of truth, most contemporary accounts do not. Many subscribe to some version or other of possible world semantics. They assume that the intentional content of any given representation – what it is about in extension – is some possible state of affairs. Such representations can also be understood in terms of specific representational targets – what is meant to be represented. Individual representations are thus made true by the obtaining of specific facts. Another important distinction is that of vehicles and contents. In case of language-based representations, linguistic signs serve as vehicles of meaning. They are meaningless, locatable spatiotemporal existents, even if the contents they sponsor are not. Nevertheless they are what enable discrete acts of mental representation; they make representation possible. Drawing directly on the analogy of sentences and their meanings, neural states or processes – or something identifiable with such – are imagined to be the basis of cognitive processing involving mental representation. There is much dispute about the exact form and properties of the vehicles of mental representation. Some, following empiricists, think of them as sensory and imagistic in character. Others endorse a more linguistically inspired conception, holding that the basic units of cognition are amodal symbols; elements of a ‘language of thought.’

Psychosemantic Theories of Content The semantic properties of mental representations, from which – some argue – all other more public representations derive their meaningful content, require special explanation. Psychosemantics is the attempt to produce a workable theory of content. In the prehistory of cognitive science only two sorts of naturalistic theories were advanced to explain representation: resemblance and causal theories. Both proved inadequate. Contemporary

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thinkers agree that the vehicles of content need not resemble what they are meant to denote in order to represent. The contentful properties of mental representations do not depend or rely upon there being any kind of resemblance between what is represented and how it is represented. There need be no inner pictures in the head that match or copy outer scenes; nor would the existence of such exotica be sufficient to explain representational relations. Two coins from the same national mint will resemble one another (almost exactly), but they do not thereby represent one another. Being similar in such respects is not enough for representation. Causal theories are no better placed to provide a naturalistic account of representation. The crudest versions appeal to causal laws. These can be understood as trading on conditional statements of the following kind: if, in the right conditions, subject S perceives an object (or feature) of type X, then S’s mental machinery will produce a token of type ‘X’ (ceteris paribus). Theories of this kind suffer from a multitude of problems, but the most devastating is the misrepresentation problem. It is demonstrable that any causal account, which makes an appeal to strict causal laws, rules out the possibility of misrepresentation, and thereby the possibility of representation. The problem is that the tokening of symbols would be caused by many other things than those exclusively in the class of things to be represented. Yet if, ex hypothesi, it is only causal relations (as defined by strict laws) that determine how specific symbol types are meaningful (if it is only causal connections that fix their representational content, reference, and truth-conditions) – then such symbols must represent or stand for the entire class of things that would cause them. This rules out any possibility of misrepresentation. But since the possibility of misrepresentation is taken as an essential requirement for representing ‘tout court,’ it turns out that the imagined symbols represent nothing at all. The fatal consequence of crude causal theories of content is that they leave no room for error. All contemporary naturalistic theories of representational content acknowledge the need to account for misrepresentation. They recognize the need to go beyond purely causal-informational accounts if they are to explain mental representation.

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Some seek to account for the norms that ground content in counterfactual terms, by appealing to the asymmetric dependence of false tokenings on true ones. This is one way of rising to the challenge. But it leaves open questions as to why one class of things is propriety in this regard, and what establishes and maintains this. Any interesting psychosemantic theory must answer such questions without making an appeal to phenomena that are already infused with, or rely on, the existence of mental representations. Teleosemantic accounts have proved popular for this reason. Such theories look best placed to circumvent the problem of misrepresentation, while providing a substantive naturalistic theory of representational content. To achieve this they make appeal to the notion of organismic proper (or teleo) functions – those that are defined in terms of the ends they serve for organisms. These functions should not be confused with purely systemic functions of the sort that are defined by the role an item or device plays within a more complex system. Rather teleofunctions concern what a device or item is supposed to do as opposed to what it is disposed to do. In explicating teleofunctions the standard naturalist strategy has been to appeal to a principled notion of biological function. The aim is to account for the basis and source of the norms in question in a scientifically respectable manner. There are a number of ways of doing this, but by far the most popular has been to explain the basis of the norms etiologically – that is, by appeal to the historical conditions and evolutionary pressures under which the devices were formed and forged. Construed thus, proper functions are explained in terms of normal conditions of operation that tell how a function was historically performed on those (perhaps rare) occasions, when it was properly performed. The historical conditions in question are those in which a given biological response originally conferred the sort of benefits that brought about, or contributed to, the selection of its underlying mechanism. Appeal to historically normal conditions, therefore, enables the explanation of why a device, entity, or response proliferated, and this, in turn, enables us to say what it is supposed to be doing, even in those cases in which it fails to achieve its ends.

Unlike other representational theories of content, which tend to focus solely on the input, teleofunctional accounts seek to clarify the notion of representation both in terms of indicative relations between the representation and the represented, as well as, by crucially emphasizing the ‘use’ that is made of purported inner representations to achieve specific organismic ends or purposes. Such approaches are consumer-based.

Phenomenal Consciousness Consciousness is an umbrella term. Philosophers recognize many varieties associated with diverse criteria. Which forms are genuine and which are basic is a matter of intensive and ongoing debate. Philosophical taxonomies are meant either to descriptively capture core features of our pretheoretical understanding of consciousness, or to identify its true characteristics, as revealed through analysis. Still, there is no clear consensus on what the concept picks out. The situation reflects, and is exacerbated by the fact that we speak of consciousness in many different ways in ordinary parlance. Nevertheless it is widely agreed that consciousness has some prominent and interesting features that must be either explained or explained away. We say that a creature or organism is conscious if it is awake and sentient. This minimally implies that it has some degree of occurrent awareness, it does not entail that we can describe the character of such awareness. Such consciousness may be awareness of its surroundings or aspects thereof or it may take a more intransitive form. Either way this is generally thought to involve being in a state of mind with a characteristic feel – one in which there is something-that-it-is-like to be in it. So understood, consciousness is an all or nothing property: one either has it or one does not. Human beings, cats, octopi (apparently), and spiders (perhaps) are kinds of things commonly thought capable of possessing it while inanimate objects, such as chairs, are not. Consciousness takes specific forms. What-itis-like to be a human being varies considerably from what-it-is-like to be a dolphin, or more famously still, what-it-is-like to be a bat. Different types of conscious beings enjoy experiences with

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phenomenally or qualitatively different characters. Moreover, particular types of experiences have distinctive characteristics. Experiencing itchiness is quite different from experiencing anger. Seeing the peculiar greenness of an aloe vera plant differs from seeing the greenness of a Granny Smith apple. Apparently experiencing makes a difference. Encountering the unusual taste and smell of durian, for example, may evoke reveries or prompt actions. Yet experiences are only sometimes implicated in the guidance of behavior and action and its autonomous or rational control. It is easy to think of examples of complex activity involving sophisticated, but apparently habitual, automatic, or unreflective responses, which are not governed by agents, precisely because those agents are not conscious of what they are doing in ways that would make it possible for them to modify their behavior. For this reason some reserve the accolade of being conscious only for those beings that exhibit a certain degree of control over their actions or those that are capable of reporting or expressing how things appear to them. Here it seems unavoidable that to have such control a creature must be aware of specific features of its environment in more than a general and intransitive sense. In addition, some hold that awareness of this kind implicates at least some degree of selfawareness. In thinking about the phenomenal character of experience, analytic philosophers often claim that token mental states of specific kinds have distinctive qualitative properties of the sort just described. It is important not to confuse the claim that experiences have phenomenal characters with the claim that these are best understood as causally efficacious mental particulars or objects (often identified with subjectively accessible feels or qualia). Equally, acknowledging the existence of phenomenal characters does not entail that these are ineffable or logically private. Moreover, although it is common for phenomenal properties to be identified using abstract categories (such as ‘greenness’) it is likely that their character is too fine-grained (or analog) to be adequately identified in this way. While sentient beings can selectively attend to and experience certain features of their environment, it may be that they are,

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nonetheless, only capable of experiencing the world in ways that are highly context-specific and circumstantial. Minimally, to say that a creature or being has an experience of a certain phenomenal character is to acknowledge that there is something-that-it-is-like for it to engage in certain activities. It is to observe that some creatures experience the world in characteristic ways. It is subjective, phenomenal consciousness, of the kind that equates to having a first-personal point of view, or perspective on the world, involving experiences with specific phenomenal characters, that is the primary concern of those who propose that consciousness can be understood in terms of representational facts or properties.

Representational Theories of Consciousness The idea that representation and consciousness are intimately connected made its most prominent debut with the advent of Cartesian philosophy in the seventeenth century. Descartes promoted an understanding of minds as being a special sort of mental substance. To have a mind is to have a coherent and unified individual perspective on reality. These unique points of view are imagined to be internally complex. It is possible to notice and attend to specific worldly features, such as the greenness of a particular apple, but this involves being able to see an apple as something more than just the sum of its presented features. To see an apple as something in which greenness, and other properties, might inhere is to see it as having a continued existence over time. To experience a world of objects and their features always occurs against a larger and more complex background in which such items are systematically related to other things. To have experience of the world, as opposed to merely having sentient capacities, is to experience it as structured. Although Descartes recognized the existence of perceptions, emotions, and sensations, to the extent that these were not under the control of the will – a decisive mark of the involvement of contentful thoughts – he relegated them to purely bodily phenomena, admitting of physiological explanation. For him these were not to be confused

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with interesting, bona fide cases of mental states. Only humans enjoy the latter, in his view. This is because we (humans, at least) do not simply get by in the world by responsive and reactive means using a battery of sensory modalities and mechanisms – being moved simply by colors, sounds, tastes or the like – rather we encounter and are conscious of the world and its aspects as being a certain way. It contains a range of properties and things, arranged thus and so. Or, at least, that is how it seems to us. How the world is, in actuality, may be quite different. The driving intuition behind this Cartesian insight is that all genuine conscious experiences are contentful; they necessarily involve having ideas – the ultimate basis for conceptual judgments. Plausibly, this is the central characteristic of the full blown, perceptual consciousness enjoyed by humans (though it remains an open question whether any other species have similar capacities). In promoting this idea Descartes is credited with having initiated the first cognitive revolution. Following in his footsteps, many of today’s philosophers and cognitive scientists also hold that the true phenomenal consciousness must have contentful features. Contemporary representational theories of consciousness endorse the basic Cartesian picture. The most ambitious versions hold that conscious experience simply equates to taking the world to be a certain way. Accordingly, what-it-is-like to be conscious boils down to having a coherent model of how things might be; one that logically and determinately excludes others. Thus, if some aspect of the world appears to be red then that same region of reality cannot also appear to be green, at the same time. This understanding of conscious experience is representational, because the way one takes things to be, can of course be false. The most ambitious representationalists not only claim that phenomenal consciousness is essentially representational in this respect; they also claim that the phenomenal character of experiences is nothing other than, or can be fully explained in terms of, the contents of tokened representations. In recent times this alleged link between phenomenal consciousness and mental representation has been less evident. Since the birth of cognitive science, until quite recently, there has been a

tendency to adopt an isolationist policy regarding these two aspects of mind. They have generally been treated as entirely separate topics of study. The tendency has been to focus on theories concerning unconscious mental states and subpersonal representations, and to ignore or avoid the question of consciousness altogether. In such a climate, demonstrating that representation and consciousness are essentially linked is a substantive project. Existing representational theories of consciousness come in a variety of forms and strengths. Some versions claim that representational facts exhaust all the experiential facts; that all experiential facts are representational facts. This is a relatively weak claim. Its proponents only commit to the view that phenomenal consciousness supervenes upon representational facts. The former need not reduce to the latter. Being in a state of mind with a representational content might be essential to being conscious, without it being the case that being conscious is nothing but representing. Taking the world to be a certain way might be one necessary factor amongst others (such as a mental state’s having particular functional properties). The phenomenal character of a given experience might be determined in complex ways. Pitched at this level of grain, representationalism can tolerate impurities in its account of what makes a creature (or its mental states) phenomenally conscious. This sort of proposal is typically cast in terms of covariance relations holding across possible worlds. The basic idea, which admits of considerable modal refinement, is that there is no possible world such that all the representational facts remain the same, yet exhibit a difference with respect to the phenomenal consciousness. For such a law to hold, it need not be the case that conscious properties per se reduce to representational properties, all that need be true is that facts about representation and consciousness travel together, always and everywhere. It may be true that there cannot be phenomenal character without representation, without it being the case that the two are more intimately related. A stronger thesis is that there can be no difference in phenomenal character without a corresponding difference in representational content; either because consciousness is just a kind of representational

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content or because it lawfully covaries with changes in such content. Those who believe that the phenomenal character of conscious mental states is exhausted, or entirely determined, by the representational properties of such states support such views. Whether representationalists advance fact-based or property-based variants, insofar as they only advance supervenience claims, they leave open a range of possibilities about what might best explain the metaphysical basis of the proposed systematic relationships. This might be explained in terms of causal dependencies, mereological part–whole relations, or token identities. The scope of such proposals is restricted in that even strong representationalists only propose that all experiential properties are representational and not vice versa. The claim is that all conscious experiences are, or are logically related to, representations, not that all representations are, or logically related to, conscious experiences. This is an important qualification because it seems clearly false that every representation does its work by invoking phenomenal properties. For example, sincerely asserting that ‘‘Snow is white’’ says that the world is such that snow is white (relative to a time, place, and language). The English sentence itself may have familiar phenomenal properties – indeed ones that we can attend to – but it does not represent the putative fact that ‘‘Snow is white’’ by presenting things to the speaker or hearer in a way that relies on it appearing that snow is white. The word ‘white’ does not denote whiteness by looking white or exhibiting the quality of whiteness. The English sentence, cited above, is a truthevaluable representation, but it is not of the mental sort. Still the point carries. For the same verdict ought to apply to items in the mental lexicon and the sentences composed from them (should any exist). For example, if we imagine that modes of presentation of some mental representations are entirely syntactic and linguaform – if they take the form of well-formed strings of amodal symbols – then such representations will clearly share the characteristic of natural language sentences of representing what they do by nonexperiential means. This does not show that no mental representations could have the relevant properties. But it does show that at best representationalism will be true only of mental representations of a select

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kind. Representing the world as being a certain way is not sufficient for being an experience with a particular phenomenal character. Not every representational fact entails an experiential fact. For example, some believe that even the lowlevel activity in early stages of human visual processing involves the manipulation of contentful representations. But, if so, the content of such representations will be quite distinct from the contents of ordinary perceptual experience. The cells that fire in low-level visual processing are orientation-invariant, whereas, our experiential way of perceiving objects is not. This implies that, at best, only a subclass of representations exhibit or involve phenomenality. It also follows that genuine phenomenal consciousness might be the province of only a small class of organisms; those whose online perceptual processing requires rich, complex, and multilevel forms of representation. It has been argued, for example, that only the abstract representations allegedly involved in the intermediate stages of human visual processing would be of the right kind to possess experiential content. If so, perhaps as Descartes thought, only humans are truly conscious. Importantly, those who defend such views also hold that contentful experiences are logically distinct from (and typically ontologically prior to) perceptual beliefs and judgments. Seeing that the wall is of a certain illumination, with various hues and a certain distance away involves enjoying a nonlinguistic, nonconceptual, representational content. It does not involve making a belief-based judgment. As a result only a special class of representations will be suitable candidates for rendering true the supervenience claims of representationalists. Yet some proponents of this view draw further distinctions even within this category, restricting their claims to the specific types of perceptual experience found in particular modalities. Accordingly differences in the phenomenal character track differences in content within the visual, auditory, or tactical modalities. There is an obvious motivation for wanting some suitably strong version of representationalism to be true. If it could be convincingly demonstrated that the phenomenal features of consciousness are really nothing but the representational features of mental states, then this promises an attractive

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metaphysical economy. Two seemingly intractable problems in the philosophy of mind would in fact turn out to be a single problem: that of accounting for representational content in naturalistic terms. While naturalizing content is generally acknowledged to be difficult to achieve, it is also thought to be less challenging than providing a straight solution to the hard problem of consciousness. If strong representationalism were true then this would allow for a considerable reduction of effort: the naturalization of representational content, in a way consistent with physicalism or materialism, would be the only hard problem. Representationalism has some intuitive appeal. It trades on the insight that conscious experience is transparent or diaphanous. To the extent that experience has any qualitative aspects, we only become aware of these by focusing on features of what a given experience is about (or is apparently about). We typically see right through our experiences to the objects of our concern or interest. In most cases it is the character of what our experiences are about that is the focus of our attention and not the experiences themselves. We are conscious of the trees blowing in the wind or of the mountain in the distance, first and foremost. Only on rare occasions, if at all, is it possible to focus our attention on the properties of the way we experience things. And, arguably, even in those cases the content of what we introspect is borrowed from the basic content of the experience itself. Those who defend a strong transparency thesis maintain that even in cases in which we concentrate on features of our experiences, we have no way of specifying their phenomenal character, other than by describing the features of what the experiences are about. Despite its initial plausibility, the truth of the strong transparency thesis has been challenged of late and softer variants promoted. Notably, although the strong transparency thesis helps to motivate representationalism, the program could in principle survive its loss.

General Objections to Representationalism A standard objection to representationalism is that it fails as a general account of conscious

experience, because it fails to encompass experience of pain, feelings, or bodily sensations (such as tickles, itches, bouts of nausea) or undirected, diffuse moods such as depression and elation (those which have no precise focus or target). Its defenders have tried to show that such experiences can be accommodated if we think of them as telling us something about the state of the organism in question – that is, as indicating something about damaged body parts, internal or external, or about the state of the creature more generally. In effect, representationalists hope to demonstrate that all experience is ultimately perceptual in nature. For if it should turn out that there are nonperceptual experiences with distinctive phenomenal characters, it would undermine the general truth of their thesis. Others have directly attacked the supervenience claims of strong representationalists. A number of thought experiments have been fashioned in order to put these under intuitive pressure. The hope has been to demonstrate that it is logically possible that representational content and phenomenal character can come apart. One way of achieving this asks us to imagine that there could be a case of difference in phenomenal character without any difference in representational content. Thus we are asked to imagine two different subjects that are functionally equivalent in the performance of a given recognition-based task, say, the sorting of red socks from blue socks. It is assumed that in order to perform this task they must represent aspects of the world as being a certain way. But it is then further stipulated that one group of sock-sorters see red as blue, while the others see red as red. But this makes no difference to either group’s ability to perform the tasks. If such cases are possible, and not just imaginable, then the qualitative aspects of experiences might vary arbitrarily, relative to their representational contents. Another tactic is to construct cases in which there is a difference in representational content while the phenomenal character remains the same. Ned Block’s Inverted Earth attempts this. The colors of his imagined world are systematically reversed with respect to ours, such that there green things are red, blue things are yellow, and so on. The language spoken by Inverted Earthlings

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is also inverted; as a result, it perfectly mirrors that of Earthlings. Just like us they are inclined to voice that ‘Grass is green’ and ‘Roses are red.’ Bearing this in mind, we are then asked to imagine that after having undergone color-inversion operations to their visual systems some Earthlings are transported to Inverted Earth – all without their knowledge. On their arrival to the character of those they experiences would be imperceivably different to those they would have on Earth in similar circumstances, even though they would be everywhere misrepresenting the colors of this new environment. This would constitute a difference in representational content without a relevant difference in phenomenal character. If such imagined scenarios are to serve as genuine counterexamples, it must be assumed that our capacity to imagine them is metaphysically revealing and relevant. A standard response to the use of such thought experiments is simply to deny this. Naturalists in particular generally challenge the idea that such imagined cases have any philosophical bite. A stronger offensive tactic is therefore to identify internal tensions that render specific representationalist proposals incoherent or unworkable. In proposing a general metaphysical thesis about the nature of phenomenal consciousness, strong representationalism need not commit to any specific theory about the nature of content, such as externalism or internalism, nor need it commit to any particular psychosemantic theory of content, such as biosemantics or causal-informational theories. But evaluating the truth of any interesting version of representationalism ultimately requires assessing specific proposals in the light of such commitments.

Objections to Externalist Variants Some strong representationalists hold that when it comes to understanding phenomenal character, we should concern ourselves only with what it is that an organism is having an experience of. What is of interest is what the experience is and how what it is about is represented. Representationalists of this stripe are interested in intentional content – what it is that one is conscious of – and not the way in which one is conscious of it.

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Such theorists endorse externalism about phenomenal character, if they also accept that intentional content cannot be individuated by internal factors alone; a view that has some support today. Thus if phenomenal character is nothing but (or strongly covaries with) intentional content and intentional content is wide or broad (in that it cannot be individuated solely by appeal to the internal properties of an organism) then phenomenal character will also share this feature. The standard externalist versions of representationalism hold that to represent is essentially a matter of tracking, or having the function to indicate specific worldly features. But which worldly features do experiences represent? These are identified with external, mind-independent, if subject-relative, ‘affordance-like’ properties – properties of the world that reliably (or reliably enough) elicit certain dispositions in specific organisms. Surface qualities or properties are what are represented. Advocates of this sort of view confront the problem of making good on objectivism about the so-called secondary properties. Consider the case of colors. Most philosophers are wary of the idea that there are any worldly features with which the colors we experience can be uniquely identified. It is generally acknowledged that our experience of color depends both on the character of our internal processes as well as our responses to specific external stimuli. To begin with, the colors and shades we see are in part determined by the ratio of activation across three light-sensitive cones in our retinas. These ratios of activation do not correspond in a one-to-one fashion to particular light stimulus configurations, but rather with a disjunction of the latter. Moreover, the distributed response of these cones initially effects changes in the retinal ganglion, and from there further processing occurs in two separate chromatic channels, known as the red-green and the blue-yellow. The interaction between these two channels underpins our chromatic experience in a way that makes the classification of hue perception a fourfold business. The problem for advocates of color externalism is that, if what constitutes our color experience constitutively depends on internal factors of this kind, then it looks as if there is not much prospect of identifying colors with any exclusively,

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mind-independent, external features of the world (such as particular wavelengths of light or spectral reflectance signatures or the like). If there are no interesting, mind-independent features of the world which can be cleanly identified with the various colors we experience then we must ask: Which properties of the environment are we tracking or representing in having color experiences? Unless there is a principled answer to this question externalism about experience is under threat. The problem generalizes, since a similar verdict looks apt to apply to other responseeliciting surface properties as well. A more serious problem facing those strong representationalists who endorse externalism concerns misrepresentation. Let us suppose that ‘phenomenal green’ is a mind-independent, response-eliciting property. We know that it can be represented truly in a variety of ways. I can represent its presence correctly even though my way of doing so does not depend on my representing its surface properties as being green per se – as when I state that the fourth book on the shelf behind me has a green spine (doing so from memory and without in any way imagining that color). But equally I might also be inclined to deny the presence of ‘phenomenal greenness’ even when I am, as a matter of fact, confronted with it. I might see something that is actually ‘phenomenal green,’ but which looks red to me: my mode of presentation may have a ‘red’ character. Perhaps this will be because the lighting conditions have been carefully adjusted so as to generate precisely this type of illusion. This would be a case of misrepresentation since I would be inclined to act as if (and would judge that) the portion of the world in question was in fact ‘red’ when it was really ‘green.’ This sort of situation is clearly possible (and not just imaginable like the Inverted Earth scenario). If so, it looks as if the relevant supervenience claim is false if one assumes that phenomenal character supervenes on wide intentional content. It seems possible to have experiences with phenomenal characters different from the intentional content of what is represented. In thinking about such cases it is important to realize that to represent successfully essentially requires that a correspondence holds between

what is represented and what does the representing. Following the linguistically inspired model of representation, specifying the content of truthconditional representation involves disquotation. Thus it is no accident that representational contents are defined by making direct reference to the worldly features or objects that representations aim to represent. But in some contexts this can be misleading, since to specify representational content in this way requires focusing squarely and exclusively on cases of successful representation. This raises important questions about how to specify the contents of representations in cases of misrepresentation; those in which there is a mismatch or, more precisely, a lack of correspondence between the state of the organism and the world. It is accepted that the way organisms respond to the range of nonveridical stimuli in instances of misrepresentation must be understood as strongly dependent upon, or as having been in some way fixed by the way they respond to a select propriety class of referents. It is because they respond appropriately when encountering tokens of those types that their representations are veridical. The precise analysis of this dependency relationship, and the prospects for explaining it naturalistically, vary according to different psychosemantic theories, as noted above. Nonetheless, whichever theory one favors, problems arise for those who want to defend the idea that phenomenal character equates to wide or broad content. For the phenomenal character of experience, and what is represented, appear not to always and everywhere keep in step. If anything, it looks as if phenomenal character is best identified with the nonintentional properties of certain modes of presentations. This might be understood in terms of representational character, as opposed to representational content. Phenomenal character should be understood as the way or manner in which things make their appearances rather than being identified with what is represented in particular cases (even if we assume that the latter places unavoidable and interesting constraints on the former). To recognize this one must acknowledge that acts of conscious experiencing with phenomenal characters have a dual structure, involving features of which one is aware and features in virtue of which such awareness is made possible.

Mental Representation and Consciousness

Objections to Internalist Variants Variants of strong representationalism that seek to reduce phenomenal character to (or identify it with) external, intentional content face serious problems. But externalism is not the only option for strong representationalists. Some have proposed that there may be an identity between phenomenal character and narrow content. Narrow content is a special sort of content recognized by internalists. The notion was first introduced in order to show how everyday psychology (which apparently only trades in wide content attributions) could nevertheless be at peace with methodological solipsism. Methodological solipsists hold that it is what agents have in mind (not external features of the world) that matter to what they do and for explanations of what they do. Recognition of the existence of narrow content was meant to show that it is possible, at some level of abstraction, to class behaviors as being psychologically identical, even when the propositional attitudes of the agents initiating those behaviors had different wide contents. This was meant to capture what is psychologically similar about physically identical duplicates when they are each operating in environments in which the wide contents of their thoughts vary, such as when one is on Earth and the other on Twin Earth. Twin Earth is a philosophical construct, a world exactly like this one in every detail, but in which the seas, lakes, and baths are filled with the substance twater. Twater has all the outward properties of water but it has the chemical make-up of XYZ (not H2O). Consequently, despite the fact that the thoughts of the two imagined agents are about different things, their behavior will be exactly the same. Internalists hope to explain this by proposing that what they have in common is the narrow content of their thoughts. Narrow content is a property of internal states; it is defined in terms of partial functions that map thoughts onto environments. This is the sort of content that the imagined twins can share even though the truth values of their thoughts may differ. It is not possible to give a positive, free-standing specification of narrow content. It is normally defined indirectly as the type of content that is independent of the way in which subjects are

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related to their environment. It is emphatically not a kind of truth conditional content. On the other hand, it is not reducible to a mere vehicle of content, understood in terms of its syntactical or functional role. Narrow contents are at best truthapt in that they become truth-evaluable when and only when they are appropriately anchored to an environment. Hence the best way to characterize narrow content is to think of it as a partial function that needs to be contextualized. Ultimately its specification depends on making an appeal to the wide intentional content. Narrow content is thus inherently and radically inexpressible. This fact raises the concern that narrow contents (should they exist at all) are misnamed; perhaps they are not really any kind of content. For if narrow contents are best understood as functions (mathematically conceived) from contexts to truth conditions then they are not strictly speaking about anything. At best, they have a special kind of potential to be so. To equate phenomenal character with narrow content would entail that phenomenal character is at best a kind of nonveridical content. This avoids the problems associated with misrepresentation, but only because there is no question of narrow contents being true or false. Such a move would seem to suit certain widely held Cartesian intuitions. For unreformed Cartesians would want to identify phenomenal character with how things seem to us. And how things seem to us is not something about which we can be mistaken. I can be mistaken that the tomato before me is green, but not that it looks green to me. My phenomenal awareness (how it seems) can be at odds with how the world is. If the phenomenal character of experience is just a kind of narrow content then it would be a kind of content for which the question of misrepresentation does not arise. If there is any coherent type of representational content that has such a feature then it is narrow content. But narrow contents are not generally assumed to be consciously accessible and if the notion proves to be unstable then, once again, phenomenal character will be identified with the nonrepresentational properties of representational states (at best). For example if the notion of narrow content does not stand up to critical scrutiny then phenomenal

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character might be identified with noncontentful representational vehicles. But clearly any such straightforward identification on its own will not adequately explain why or how we sometimes represent the world in a phenomenologically salient way. To constitute a satisfying explanation of this kind the vehicles in question would have to have some rather special additional properties, but such properties may, at best, be logically related with certain kinds of representational acts without being representational or contentful properties per se.

Objections Concerning Subjectivity Another worry for representationalists is that more is needed to understand phenomenal consciousness than an account of phenomenal character in any case. Even if there were a workable representationalist story about the latter it would not suffice to explain the former. This is obviously so if, for example, we allow that it is possible to be in a state of mind with a specific phenomenal character without in any way being aware (or even being capable of being aware) of being in such a psychological condition. It is imaginable that certain creatures might undergo pain (in the sense that there is something-that-it-is-like for them to have painful experiences) even though they would be congenitally unable to access these qualitative feels for themselves. If so they would feel pain without being aware of the painful experiences. This seems more than merely theoretically possible. There is some phenomenological evidence that we sometimes undergo experiences with characteristic phenomenal feels, such as being in pain or anger, without noticing, attending or being aware of these at the time of their occurrence. If so, we can distinguish experiences of which organisms are unaware from those that are, to invoke some well-worn metaphors, brought before the mind’s eye or illuminated by the spotlight of attention. Some will object that the very idea of unexperienced experiences is incoherent. They will claim that to have an experience logically entails the existence of a subject (of some sort) – one that actively undergoes or is aware of the experience in question. Experiencing necessarily involves

bringing the subject in on the act. This is because experiencing is necessarily experiencing-for something or someone. Whether unexperienced experiences are possible or not, it is clear that experiences are ordinarily experienced. If so a proper account of everyday phenomenal consciousness requires something more than a mere account of phenomenal character; in addition it requires an account of the subjective nature of experiencing. A number of recent attempts have been made to account for the subjectivity of consciousness in representational terms. These come in the form of higher-order theories of representation of either perception-based or thought-based varieties. The core idea behind all such theories is that first-order mental states are in some sense rendered conscious when they become the objects of other mental states. This is thought to involve a kind of second-order self-monitoring that utilizes either meta-representations or re-representations. A root problem with such higher theories of representation is that they threaten to make the first-order phenomenal character of experiences superfluous in fixing or determining the what-itis-likeness of phenomenal experiences. This is because if the subjective aspect of experiencing is determined by second-order representational properties then there is always a risk of misrepresentation. Thus it is possible that what-it-is-like to experience, say, the color green will be fixed by higher order representational properties even in those cases in which the phenomenal character of the lower-order mental state is misrepresented. These will include situations in which one is, in fact, having an experience with a different phenomenal character (say, of red or blue) and those in which one’s mental states lack phenomenal character altogether. In such circumstances things might still appear to be green because the higherorder monitoring is doing all of the decisive work in determining how things seem to the subject. The problem emerges in duplex accounts of this kind because there is always the possibility that the low-order and higher-order states might be out of sync. This is because representation is an extrinsic, external relation and not a constitutive one. This difficulty can be overcome or avoided by supposing that our experiences are in some way

Mental Representation and Consciousness

intrinsically subjective. An intimate, nonpositional kind of awareness is quite unlike adopting a representational stance toward one’s mental states. Experiences might be Janus-facing – if so, they would not only exhibit world-direct intentionality, but their character is given to the experiential subject in some minimal, prereflective way. The idea that experience necessarily has the feature of givenness is a familiar one in the work of the great phenomenological thinkers and it can be found, arguably, even in Descartes and Kant. The closest representationlists have come to accommodating this has been to endorse the view that phenomenal consciousness involves the having of self-representing representations. But to make sense of this proposal requires positing the existence of representations of a unique kind, those with quite special (if not naturalistically impossible) properties. Accounting for such representations would be difficult, at best, within the compass of existing theories of psychosemantics.

Nonrepresentational Accounts Strong first-order representationalist proposals (of both the externalist and internalist varieties) look to be too strong. The way things seem or feel to an organism phenomenally does not appear to equate to any kind of representational content, narrow or wide. Weaker, impure versions of representationalism – those that cast their identity claims at the level of facts and not properties – are more plausible. Proponents of such accounts concede that not only do select representations have phenomenal features, but also that such features may be best understood in terms of nonrepresentational properties. As such weak representationalism allows that the phenomenal features that give experiences their special characters are not explained by their being a kind of representational content, but, at best, by their role in performing representationally related service. This claim is weak enough to be consistent with accounts of the nature of experiences that regard them as external, in a way quite different to the proposals of strong representationalists.

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Emphasizing their ecological and interactive nature, enactivists claim that experiences are not inner events of any sort; rather they are constituted by the activity of organisms engaging with some environment or other. Subjective experiences that have specific phenomenal characters are identified with temporally extended worldly interactions. Brain activity may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for experience. The causal substrate that fixes the character of any token experience is temporally and spatially extended to include aspects of the brains, bodies, and environments of organisms. Ontologically speaking experiences just are extended spatiotemporal happenings – the reactions, actions, and interactions of embodied creatures situated in the world. As such they are a subclass of events; they are roughly dateable and locatable happenings. While such mental events necessarily involve active, living organisms, they do not occur wholly inside them. Experiences, understood as events or token occurrences, can also be characterized as physical. They are instances of lived, embodied activity, which can be designated and characterized using vocabulary that makes no use of phenomenal predicates. For this reason experiences can be the objects of scientific theorizing and experimentation. All of this is consistent with weak representationalism, but the more radical versions of enactivism go further, claiming that organisms act first and develop the capacity for thought later. Accordingly they hold that it is not necessary for creatures to think about or represent in order to act successfully in the world. If this is true it reduces the scope of even weak representationalism, since phenomenal consciousness would be more basic and fundamental than the capacity to represent the world as being a certain truthevaluable way. Experiencing aspects of the world might be thoroughly noncontentful; aspects of the world might not be presented as being in a certain contentful way to subjects at all, even though there would be something-it-is-like to engage with worldly offerings in phenomenologically salient ways. See also: Inner Speech and Consciousness; MetaAwareness; Visual Imagery and Consciousness.

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Suggested Readings Block N (1990) Inverted earth. Philosophical Perspectives 4: 53–79. Brook A (ed.) (2007) The Prehistory of Cognitive Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Byrne A (2001) Intentionalism defended. Philosophical Review 110: 199–240. Crane T (2001) Elements of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dretske F (1995) Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fodor JA (1987) Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gallagher S and Zahavi D (2007) The Phenomenological Mind. London: Routledge. Kind A (2003) What’s so transparent about transparency? Philosophical Studies 115: 225–244.

Kriegel U (2002) Phenomenal content. Erkenntnis 57: 175–198. Lycan W (1996) Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Neander K (1998) The division of phenomenal labor: A problem for representationalist theories of consciousness. Philosophical Perspectives 12: 411–434. Noe¨ A (2004) Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rowlands M (2001) The Nature of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Seager W (2000) Theories of Consciousness. London: Routledge. Tye M (1996) Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zahavi D (2005) Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Biographical Sketch

Daniel D. Hutto was born and schooled in New York, but finished his undergraduate degree as a study abroad student at St. Andrews, Scotland. His maternal roots are Scottish and many of his family still live in Inverness. He returned to New York to teach fourth grade in the Bronx for a year in order to fund his MPhil in logic and metaphysics, after which he carried on his doctoral work in York. He now lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and three boys, having joined the local university in 1993. He served as the head of philosophy from 1999 to 2005, and is currently the research leader for philosophy. He has published on wide range of philosophical topics in journals including: The Monist; Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society; Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and Mind and Language. He is the author of The Presence of Mind (1999), Beyond Physicalism (2000), Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy (2006), and Folk Psychological Narratives (2008). He is also the editor of Narrative and Understanding Persons (2007) and coeditor of Current Issues in Idealism (1996) and Folk Psychology Re-Assessed (2007). A special yearbook issue of consciousness and emotion, entitled Radical Enactivism, which focuses on his philosophy of intentionality, phenomenology, and narrative, was published in 2006.