Nice article. I do have some concerns with your treatment of the blue ball-red ball case. Let me try to sketch the issue I have in mind.
Imagine someone overwhelmed with pleasure, so fully immersed that much of their cognitive machinery shuts down. They are not forming beliefs like “I am having a great time,” not reflecting, and not entertaining any abstract propositions. There is no introspection, no metacognitive access, just the experience itself.
Then, suddenly, everything flips. The person is overtaken by intense pain. A mental switch gets flipped. The pain dominates in the same way, without belief, without conceptual grasp. The person still cannot entertain propositions. So in both cases, there is no doxastic seeming.
What I want to claim is this: the person knows that something changed, not because they believed “something changed,” but simply by undergoing the shift. The noticing itself is, I think, a kind of knowledge. Unless we assume from the start that knowledge must involve propositions, I see no reason not to count this.
As for justification, this kind of phenomenal recognition, this awareness of difference, draws on a basic perceptual and experiential capacity. It involves immediate recognition of change, even when the intensity of the experience rules out conceptualization or the formation of propositions. It seems like a good candidate for a foundational belief, even if we are not aiming to build epistemology on foundations. The justification here is direct, not inferential, and not the result of any error-prone process. That does not mean we can build a complete theory of knowledge from this kind of case, and I am not claiming we should. But it does seem to be a genuine instance where justification arises from experience alone, without mediation, and in a way that rightly counts as foundational.
One might object that recognizing contrast between pleasure and pain requires memory, that the subject must recall the previous state in order to register a change. But I think that is not necessary. What matters is that the specious present, the briefly extended now of perceptual consciousness, can contain both affective states. The transition, embedded in that lived moment, already carries enough temporal structure to register the contrast. So the awareness of change does not rely on memory, but on the structure of experience itself. The shift is directly given, not retrieved.
Interesting, thanks. The view you sketch seems to me to have no argument in favor of it, and by itself seems questionable.“Something changed” is quite obviously a proposition, and knowledge attributions containing “that”-clauses are all attributing propositional knowledge. Smith knows that something changed only if the proposition that something changed is true. We can and do of course build simple devices that react to changes—thermostats, surge protectors, etc—and nothing is preventing us from describing them as having knowledge if we didn’t feel like that was perhaps gratuitous. But if we say they “know that” immediately before a propositional clause like “the room temperature has surpassed 72 degrees Fahrenheit” we’ve attributed to them an instance of propositional knowledge.
Here’s a sketch of how’d I put what I’m thinking of in “argument” form:
P1: Some agents detect contrast without concepts
P2: In such cases, the contrast detection would require the alteration of the subject's experience to be eliminated
P3: Any instance of nonconceptual contrast detection constitutes knowledge ↔ eliminating that detection would require altering the subject's experience
Let's call such kind of detection GNCD (good nonconceptual contrast detection)
P4: If GNCD is knowledge, then awareness of the absence of GNCD is also knowledge
P5: GNCD and the absence of GNCD together exhaust the set of nonconceptual experiences
C: Therefore, nonconceptual experiences can constitute knowledge
So P1 is my Extreme Pleasure-Pain case, I don't think you'll get off the bus there. P2 specifies a difference in this kind of contrast detection and thermostat kinds of contrast detection, with P3 specially excluding those sorts of contrasts, also excluding stuff such as contrast-detection-driven changes in my brain or body that I'm not aware of. I find this exclusion principled, I take it you'd insist with your "knowledge must be propositional" point, I just think this is a counter-example, the way I think about knowledge would prohibit me saying that in the EPP case the subject doesn't know that something chaged, the subject has information even if he doesn't entertain the proposition "something changed", we may reach an impasse here if you insist that "that" always implies propositional knowledge, I take this to be a counter-example. Importantly, this information seems relevant for epistemic purposes: eliminate it from the chain and there'd be no way for the agent to talk about what happened after the fact once his cognition went back to normal, there'd be nothing to talk about! I take P4 to be natural when thinking about a pure "Extreme Pain" case, in that case the person knows that nothing changed as he endured the same agony even without entertaining the proposition "nothing is changing/changed". P5 is trivial. Anyway, what are your thoughts?
Thanks for all this. While I remain unconvinced, I think it’s interesting and I appreciate the time and thought you’ve put into. My main reaction is that P3 is the lynchpin and it’s inadequately motivated. Your remarks on it mostly amount to expressing that you think it’s a counter example to my claim (if it were true, it would indeed be a counter example; but is it true?). The main support I see from you for P3 is the thing about “there’d be nothing to talk about,” which I don’t see as particularly convincing. Suppose what would happen if the sun suddenly blipped out of existence just now. The sun is 8 light minutes away from us, so for the remainder of those 8 minutes no causal effect from the sun’s disappearance would have made its way to us. We could continue to make utterances like “the sun sure is bright” even though in a strained sense of “talking about something” we are talking about nothing, since what we are talking about no longer exists and is, in this strained interpretation, nothing at all. Probably a better, less strained, thing to say is that we frequently talk about things that no longer exist and also things that never have and never will exist. So, the disappearance of the experiential thing in your example wouldn’t yield a case in which “we’d have nothing to talk about.” We’d have plenty to talk about.
What I mean is, we're not as logical as we like to think (nor should we be, but life will go a lot smoother if we can recognize that about ourselves). I'm not disagreeing with you on the logic, the point may very well be a tautology, but it's one many people, even very intelligent rational people, find shocking and deeply disturbing. Some will even get angry when you point it out to them because they think of themselves as purely rational, only persuaded by logical arguments, so how could they have believed in this absurdity?
Maybe for many people the right answer to the question “how could they have believed in this absurdity?” Is: “they didn’t, they never have, and it’s supremely uncharitable to interpret them as having believed in something that’s plainly contradictory.” If someone who you know has been divorced 3 times announced “I am going to marry someone who is unmarried,” are you going to interpret them as saying something contradictory (“I will become married to someone who is at the same time not married at all”) or something non-contradictory (“I will become married to someone who, unlike me, has never before been married”)? Charity favors the first interpretation. Imagine someone who not only defends the second interpretation, but goes on and writes long books about it. There’s an absurdity.
I don't mean anyone self-attributes contradictory beliefs and I think you know that. We can believe in logical contradictions without realizing it and we can continue to believe even while recognizing it enough for it to make us uncomfortable on some level. When someone points out to us that we're not being logical, that doesn't necessarily mean we instantly change our minds or give up our illogical position. Nor should we. Logic is a tool, and it's one that can be misused. We have every right to take our time and be suspicious of an argument that upends everything we formerly believed to be true, regardless of how airtight the logic seems. Please don't act like you have no clue what I'm talking about. You're smarter than that.
One small point of disagreement or clarification, perhaps.
> Doxastic appearances are appearances enough. I don’t see any way around the fact that there are always going to be some beliefs or other that we have without being able to give a bullshit-free account of why we have them.
I agree that these sorts of justifications have to bottom out somewhere. But I don't think it's quite right to say that we cannot present an account of why we have these beliefs. Ultimately, we can give a sort of scientific third-person account of how human beliefs are formed, taking in neuroscience, evolutionary history and so on. This account will also explain why, by and large, these beliefs are formed reliably in the sorts of contexts where it was adaptive to be reliable.
Of course, the problem here is that we only get to our understanding of science via the very belief-forming apparatus we are attempting to justify, so this isn't a justification. It all ends up circular. But it is an account. It's a circular, self-consistent, self-supporting account. The circularity means it's not a free-standing justification. But the self-consistency means it is an account that at least might be true, and if true, then it explains why we believe as we do.
However, given that we have no choice but to use the belief-forming apparatus we have, then I think we might as well accept as an axiom that our belief forming apparatus is somewhat reliable at least for simple cases (because otherwise reasoning about anything is hopeless). And if we can reason reliably about simple cases then the hope is that we can break down complex problems into small steps such that we can figure those out too. Plausibly, then, the account of why we believe as we do can be justified with respect to that basic axiom.
i think you’re misreading my “we”. I’m not talking about, as you are, what we collectively can do, I’m talking about what’s the case for each person: for each person, there’s going to be some belief or other for which they won’t be able to tell you why they believe that. This is an empirical claim about people. It’s of course logically possible that there’s a person who can go around in big beautiful logically consistent circles for every belief they have, always having a non-confabulatory answer for why they believe each thing they believe. No one has yet met such a person.
I think I can give an account. It’s just coarse-grained. I believe that ball is blue because my visual system disposes me to form such a judgment, and my visual system disposes me to form such a judgment because it is adaptive to be able to form such judgments in some cases, and it is is adaptive to form such judgments in some cases because there really are things with surface reflectance properties that are tracked with such judgments, and those surface reflectance properties can be correlated with information that can give a survival advantage, and so tracking them reliably is an adaptive feature of human visual systems, so I can trust my visual system in typical cases, so the ball really does have the surface reflectance properties we track with words such as “blue”, “azure” and so on. And this whole picture is enabled because I can reason reasonably OK about simple stuff, because that too is adaptive.
The difference here between this and your Chicago example is that there is no such corresponding story there. It’s neither very obviously adaptive for someone to know what’s going on in Chicago, nor is there any plausible mechanism by which it is possible. So your Chicago point is good, and I have no major disagreement with you, I just think you’re going a little too far when you say that we’re always going to find beliefs for which no account can be given.
I guess I didn't really address your point fairly.
You're saying that just because I might be able to give an account like this for seeing a blue ball doesn't mean that I can always give an account like this for all my beliefs. And that's fair.
But I think that doesn't really matter for the larger point you're trying to make. If there were someone who could give a non-confabulatory answer for why they believe each thing they believe, it wouldn't defeat your point in this post at all, as far as I can see. So I just thought you went a little bit too far in suggesting that (or seeming to suggest that), in general, we can't have accounts for why we believe what we believe.
The point being that there's ways to justify a belief without an infinite regress or accepting that there is no account for some belief. Instead of suggesting that you're going to eventually have to give up and say "I don't know why I believe that", there is also the possibility of the kind of approach I'm suggesting.
“Smith, you say you know the balls are different because you can see one is red and the other is blue. But how do you know THAT? How do you know you see one as red and the other as blue?”
How do I *know* that I see the ball is red? I have no choice in the matter: it simply and unequivocally appears red as a function of my perceptual set up. Its appearance isn't a conclusion drawn from more secure premises. Knowledge claims have to bottom out somewhere on pain of an epistemic regress and sensory qualities are exactly where they bottom out: epistemic primitives that can't be further justified since they are the basic qualitative terms in which the world appears to us conscious creatures, terms we aren't in an observational relation to but rather subjectively consist of as experiencers. They are exactly what cut off the "inner eye" regress you think bedevils the phenomenal realist.
The doxastic appearance you think disqualifies qualities is the challenge: “I don’t know why I believe that the ball is red, I just do”. But we know why: it appears red, where such an appearance is itself not an object of knowledge but simply a function of a recognitional, discriminative capacity that grounds beliefs such as the ball is red. We don't "know" red, we can only discriminate and report it as in reporting, truthfully, that we see the ball is red.
>Knowledge claims have to bottom out somewhere on pain of an epistemic regress and sensory qualities are exactly where they bottom out
I totally agree with this! As Professor Mandik wonderfully illustrates with his "Inside Out" criticism, infinite regress is impossible. Clearly human minds are operating with some sort of primitives. Why not call these qualia? Or if that term is too overloaded, call it something else. Now the nature of these primitives we can debate: are the "real" (whatever that means), or "illusionary" (whatever that means), etc. We can also debate whether there are non-sensory primitives, or if all primitives are sensory.
But the idea of primitives is a clear concept in my mind, and puts the idea of qualia on strong footing.
The ordinary word for this already exists - perceptions. The word is also a good starting point for developing more technical notions, like by separating interoception from exteroception, or by separating sounds from colors. Qualia meanwhile is only used in philosophy of mind and no one agrees whether the primary usage entails antiphysicalism or whether it's theory neutral or whether there are diet versions of it, propagating terminological understanding far and wide.
> Clearly human minds are operating with some sort of primitives. Why not call these qualia?
This is what I meant by "this," I think the rest of their comment is trying to sketch out "primitives" in some theory neutral way, and some theory neutral ordinary terminology would be "perceptions" rather than "qualia" or "primitives."
Ok, thanks. For what it’s worth I think it’s both far from obvious and outright implausible that there are mental primitives. Further, I think that if there were such things as mental primitives, perceptions would be poor candidates for them. The person you were replying to sounded to me like they had some super old-fashioned theory like Hume’s in mind, whereby simple sensory ideas are obtained as copies of sensory impressions and all other mental states are complexes somehow assembled from these copies.
So like: You can have many thoughts, but "thinking" isn't the right word, because what they meant to describe was the minimal capabilities needed to have a thought in the first place?
just like how Jones’s beliefs bottom out with Chicago. So either Chicago itself is a quale, (which is ridiculous) or so-called qualia aren’t helping rise to the challenge such cases as Jones’s help to articulate
I'd say Jones feeling about Chicago is a quale -- the mind primitive is not literally the same as the city. But perhaps I'm misunderstanding the example.
It's also worth considering that people can be mistaken, and therefore its reasonable to think people are mistaken about the source of judgement, which then throws the idea of a mind primitive in to doubt. I would say mind primitives happen how they happen, and then we analyze them using other mind primitives that don't fully capture the original. This isn't an infinite regress so much as an unfortunate but necessary limit to cognition. Maybe Jones doesn't know where his Chicago insight came from, but it came from somewhere.
yes, you are misunderstanding the example. jones has beliefs , not feelings, caused by chicago, smith has beliefs allegedly caused by qualia/feelings. why are smith’s beliefs about qualia/feelings justified but jones’s beliefs about chicago are not?
I see, thanks for the clarification. I think I could use some reading on thoughts, beliefs, judgements, as they supposedly relate (or don't) to qualia. The iep link might be a good place to start, thanks!
Lets see... The world as we experience it appears in terms of the sensory qualities that populate conscious perceptual episodes: the ball uncontroversially appears red to me, so in terms of your dichotomy I'd say the ball's appearance is phenomenal, not doxastic. Its appearance leads me to report how it appears to me and perhaps to believe it's red (about which I might be mistaken given the lighting conditions, etc.) But the sensory qualities of conscious perceptual episodes don't appear to me; they are simply present, the constituents of my experience to which I'm not in an observational relationship as I am to the ball. I don't have a perspective on my red as I do the ball: my red isn't right or wrong or assessable in terms of accuracy conditions as is the claim that the ball is red. My recognition of red isn't knowledge in terms of it meeting a descriptive specification - it's simply the involuntary result of my perceptual set up. But that recognition participates in forming my (corrigible) beliefs about the world since the world appears in descriptive terms of it and other sensory qualities.
aside from just begging the question about there being phenomenal appearances, i don’t see how this supplies subjectively accessible justifiers to Smith in a way that wouldn’t also grant that Jones has subjectively accessible justification for his Chicago beliefs by stipulating that Jones is subjectively accessing Chicago.
I didn't beg the question about there being phenomenal appearances. I said the world appears phenomenally, so answered the question in the affirmative. And my point was that sensory qualities are not "subjectively accessible justifiers" since we don't access them; they are simply reliably present in consciousness in response to situations as our first line non-conceptual cognitive apparatus. The reason we credit Smith's belief that the ball appears red is because there are well known causal and perceptual mechanisms that reliably link luminance/reflectance properties of objects to sensory experiences involving color qualities that we all involuntarily recognize. We then form corrigible beliefs about the world on the basis of that recognition. Whereas there's no such story for what Jones believes about Chicago.
A good way out of your circle of terms (e.g., qualia defined in terms of phenomena) is to start with an example of a quale. Here’s one: The color blue. What do our sciences have to say about blue? Well, since Galileo, we’ve understood that there’s nothing blue up there in the sky, that lazurite is made up of molecules whose only relation to blue is that it causes selective reflection of light waves at various frequencies, which result in blue experiences when received by typical human visual systems. The light is completely describable in terms of energies at various frequencies. The results in the human brain are completely describable in such terms as degrees of activation of neurons, patterns of activation of groups of neurons, or perhaps patterns of changes in electrical fields in the brain, or quantum collapses in microtubules, or . . . – in any case, some very complex physical events.
A serviceable definition of liquidity is something like ‘flows (seeks low level) if unconstrained’. When water is discovered to be composed of things that are not liquid, i.e., H2O molecules, there is an explanation of why water flows (when sufficiently warm). Roughly, there are then no strong bonds between H2O molecules, so there is no obstacle to their passing by each other as gravitational force pulls them downward.
There is no such definition of blue. (Do not say “It’s what typical humans experience when they look at cloudless skies, or lazurite, in daytime”. That’s an account of what causes blue experiences, not a definition of blue. The definition of liquidity says what it is, not what causes it.) So, there is no way of giving a parallel explanation of how blue relates to the physical world. It is this fact that gives rise to the idea in the first place, that blue (and colors in general, and even more generally, what Locke called ‘secondary qualities’) are not ordinary denizens of the physical world. ‘Quale’ is the philosophers’ term or art for such qualities. I won’t start in on my arguments against physicalist proposals about what instances of blue are identical with, or why they don’t exist at all; they are easy to find. I’ll just identify the question to which I think a dualist answer is the best: What do you do with blue?
Chisholm’s distinction can be most easily seen with ‘looks’. This is a visual term. Things can look differently in one lighting condition from the way they look in another. (Sellars’s example: A tie that looked blue in the bad fluorescent lighting of a shop, but looks green when taken outside.) In the non-doxastic sense of ‘looks’, a thing has to present a visual appearance of some kind. Of course, there is another sense of ‘looks’ that does not require anything visual. There is no way that bankruptcy (as such) affects one’s visual system, yet we easily understand someone who says ‘Bankruptcy looks imminent’, ‘It looks like the stock market will rise’. Even ‘It looks like rain” is not a report of anything that looks like (gives the visual appearance of) rain. What is visually appearing is dark clouds, not rain (yet). If it were actually raining, “It looks like rain” would be puzzling: is one a skeptic who suspects someone is dropping little globules of glass? Or a philosopher pontificating “It looks like rain, I have no reason to doubt my senses, so, very likely, it is rain”?
In short, Chisholm’s distinction is between a sense of ‘looks’ that requires visual appearance, and a sense of ‘looks’ that does not. It’s harder to state the point for ‘seems’, but that’s because seeming can apply to several of the senses (hearing, tasting, etc.) whereas ‘looks’ is definitely tied to visual appearance. But once the point is clear for ‘looks’, I think the generalization for ‘seems’ is obvious. E.g., a person could intelligibly say “It seems the sound is fading” while being in a soundproof room and reading a dial connected to a microphone that’s picking up sound some miles distant and converting the signal to an electronic driver of the dial. That’s different from a person’s use of the same words while listening to a radio station that is having a problem with its power source.
One final point concerning the first paragraph of your section ‘A Fantastic Voyage’. The answer you attribute to Smith in answer to “How do you know you see one as red and the other as blue” is “I introspect with my mind’s eye that I’m having distinctly visual qualia . . . and I can introspect that I’m having distinct visual qualia of phenomenal redness and phenomenal blueness”. This is a straw man attribution. The right answer is that if “how one knows” is assumed to involve a process that is, in effect, an inference, then there is no “How” involved here. Smith does not know he’s seeing a red and a blue ball by inference from anything else. But that does not mean there’s nothing more to be said. Smith knows he’s seeing one ball as red and one as blue because he’s learned his color words. It’s a matter of linguistic training. The red color in one’s experiences (for example) is the color of the experiences that one has when looking at certain crayons, bullfighter’s capes, ripe strawberries, male cardinals, and so forth – items that the adults from whom you learn color vocabulary say is ‘red’; and analogously for blue.
There must be some words that are learned like this, otherwise language could not get off the ground. (I think you’ll agree with this.)
I think there's an innocent reading of the phenomenal sense of "seeming." Take the Müller-Lyer illusion you mentioned - the lines seem unequal to you, but you're not convinced they actually are unequal. This applies even to philosophical zombies.
why must that be a reading of the so-called phenomenal sense instead of a plurality of doxastic seemings? I can think I’m going to pass the exam without being 100% certain; I can be inclined to believe P without fully believing P; and so on.
If we narrow our equivalence criteria such that it's a different Linda at every moment, then we can necessitate *this* Linda (at this sunglasses-wearing moment) wearing sunglasses. Since all conceptual criteria are up to us and since modal operators can & should be relativized, there are necessitatarianism*s* (plural), some of which are true, some not, and none of them true in a way that pulverizes contingency universally.
2 years ago Amy was on Joe Schmid's channel, this was my reply then:
-=-=-=-=-
A few things that, when we remember them, it's easier to see how this all fits together:
(1) Possible[X] applies to whatever isn't ruled out in X, where X is some modality & scope. X can be metaphysical modality using George's metaphysic. X can be epistemic modality using Emma's data set. I noticed Joe at one point saying "genuinely, real possibilities -- the real, metaphysical possibility, the genuine possibility" and pitting that against mere "epistemic" possibility. We gotta watch out for bagpipes on that. First, one can reasonably affirm that epistemic possibility is the most genuine kind of possibility that we're dealing with here. Second, "metaphysical possibility" isn't some monolithic thing -- there is a completely distinct definition of possibility for each metaphysic one might use. To adapt our philosophical intuitions to "demote" metaphysical modality and "promote" epistemic modality in this way takes a pretty big mindshift.
(2) We can still talk about contingent relationships through our imagination about counterfactual (specifically false- or undefined-antecedent counterfactual) situations. We can imagine them like "holodecks." It's very useful for regret, learning, factor analysis, forecasting, etc. to do these exercises. All we have to do is remember that these events are either false (in the case of false-antecedent counterfactuals) or unknown (in the case of undefined-antecedent counterfactuals). The holodeck is calibrated with a specific scenario (either an epistemically possible one in our scope, or one known to be fictitious) and we test what plays out under that fantasy.
Once we remember 1 & 2, it's easy to see how necessitarianism may be true, but there's still contingent relationships strung through hypotheticals, and there's still genuine possibility (in the form of epistemic possibility).
Let's apply this to the die roll. Let's roll the die under a cup, and slam the cup down. We hear the die fall flat, but we don't know which face it's on. Here, we say that each face is possible -- exactly like if we hadn't rolled the die yet, with the same math. We lift the cup, and it's 3. Here, the "ghosts" of the other faces linger in our brains -- especially if they have ramifications (e.g., if I had gotten a 4 I would have won a game, and I was so close! It could have been 4!). But then we catch ourselves, remembering that the die roll, while chaotic, was a product of a storm of causes -- the speed of the shaking hand, the shape of the cup, the force of the slam, etc. If you add all those up, it could not have been otherwise, needless to say...
... UNLESS those upstream factors had been different! We can imagine they had been different ("if the shape of the cup had been more beveled") and this reopens the epistemic space ("then possibly other numbers would have resulted").
And therefore we can say something like: "Necessitarianism may be true, but possibilities are genuine in any epistemic suspense, so contingent thinking nevertheless has its use."
Excellent points, and very welcome ones. The following comment is not directed so much at you as at anyone else who might care what I do or don’t think about necessitarianism:
I didn’t mean to express that I have any beef with necessitarianism (or even a lack of interest in it) but the point I care about is one proven by the mere fact that Amy felt the need to write a whole book about it. It’s that there’s a distinction between statements that are true merely by being axioms or basic theorems in logical calculi, like “If P then P” and “necessarily if P then P” versus statements whose defense requires extra-logical material, like whether there are essences, or natural kinds, or anything at all. Treating the two sorts of statement as equivocal is fallacious. Anyway, see you at tomorrow’s sea battle!
I pretty much agree with all of this. (At least after I looked up "doxastic".)
"What if we could just identify phenomenal consciousness with appearances?"
This was me for a long time, and I'm still open to someone doing it. But now the question I always have for them is: do you still see a hard problem, explanatory gap, etc? If so, then what's making it so hard? The answer tends to bring back the objectionable stuff, often under different names.
Nice article. I do have some concerns with your treatment of the blue ball-red ball case. Let me try to sketch the issue I have in mind.
Imagine someone overwhelmed with pleasure, so fully immersed that much of their cognitive machinery shuts down. They are not forming beliefs like “I am having a great time,” not reflecting, and not entertaining any abstract propositions. There is no introspection, no metacognitive access, just the experience itself.
Then, suddenly, everything flips. The person is overtaken by intense pain. A mental switch gets flipped. The pain dominates in the same way, without belief, without conceptual grasp. The person still cannot entertain propositions. So in both cases, there is no doxastic seeming.
What I want to claim is this: the person knows that something changed, not because they believed “something changed,” but simply by undergoing the shift. The noticing itself is, I think, a kind of knowledge. Unless we assume from the start that knowledge must involve propositions, I see no reason not to count this.
As for justification, this kind of phenomenal recognition, this awareness of difference, draws on a basic perceptual and experiential capacity. It involves immediate recognition of change, even when the intensity of the experience rules out conceptualization or the formation of propositions. It seems like a good candidate for a foundational belief, even if we are not aiming to build epistemology on foundations. The justification here is direct, not inferential, and not the result of any error-prone process. That does not mean we can build a complete theory of knowledge from this kind of case, and I am not claiming we should. But it does seem to be a genuine instance where justification arises from experience alone, without mediation, and in a way that rightly counts as foundational.
One might object that recognizing contrast between pleasure and pain requires memory, that the subject must recall the previous state in order to register a change. But I think that is not necessary. What matters is that the specious present, the briefly extended now of perceptual consciousness, can contain both affective states. The transition, embedded in that lived moment, already carries enough temporal structure to register the contrast. So the awareness of change does not rely on memory, but on the structure of experience itself. The shift is directly given, not retrieved.
Interesting, thanks. The view you sketch seems to me to have no argument in favor of it, and by itself seems questionable.“Something changed” is quite obviously a proposition, and knowledge attributions containing “that”-clauses are all attributing propositional knowledge. Smith knows that something changed only if the proposition that something changed is true. We can and do of course build simple devices that react to changes—thermostats, surge protectors, etc—and nothing is preventing us from describing them as having knowledge if we didn’t feel like that was perhaps gratuitous. But if we say they “know that” immediately before a propositional clause like “the room temperature has surpassed 72 degrees Fahrenheit” we’ve attributed to them an instance of propositional knowledge.
Here’s a sketch of how’d I put what I’m thinking of in “argument” form:
P1: Some agents detect contrast without concepts
P2: In such cases, the contrast detection would require the alteration of the subject's experience to be eliminated
P3: Any instance of nonconceptual contrast detection constitutes knowledge ↔ eliminating that detection would require altering the subject's experience
Let's call such kind of detection GNCD (good nonconceptual contrast detection)
P4: If GNCD is knowledge, then awareness of the absence of GNCD is also knowledge
P5: GNCD and the absence of GNCD together exhaust the set of nonconceptual experiences
C: Therefore, nonconceptual experiences can constitute knowledge
So P1 is my Extreme Pleasure-Pain case, I don't think you'll get off the bus there. P2 specifies a difference in this kind of contrast detection and thermostat kinds of contrast detection, with P3 specially excluding those sorts of contrasts, also excluding stuff such as contrast-detection-driven changes in my brain or body that I'm not aware of. I find this exclusion principled, I take it you'd insist with your "knowledge must be propositional" point, I just think this is a counter-example, the way I think about knowledge would prohibit me saying that in the EPP case the subject doesn't know that something chaged, the subject has information even if he doesn't entertain the proposition "something changed", we may reach an impasse here if you insist that "that" always implies propositional knowledge, I take this to be a counter-example. Importantly, this information seems relevant for epistemic purposes: eliminate it from the chain and there'd be no way for the agent to talk about what happened after the fact once his cognition went back to normal, there'd be nothing to talk about! I take P4 to be natural when thinking about a pure "Extreme Pain" case, in that case the person knows that nothing changed as he endured the same agony even without entertaining the proposition "nothing is changing/changed". P5 is trivial. Anyway, what are your thoughts?
Thanks for all this. While I remain unconvinced, I think it’s interesting and I appreciate the time and thought you’ve put into. My main reaction is that P3 is the lynchpin and it’s inadequately motivated. Your remarks on it mostly amount to expressing that you think it’s a counter example to my claim (if it were true, it would indeed be a counter example; but is it true?). The main support I see from you for P3 is the thing about “there’d be nothing to talk about,” which I don’t see as particularly convincing. Suppose what would happen if the sun suddenly blipped out of existence just now. The sun is 8 light minutes away from us, so for the remainder of those 8 minutes no causal effect from the sun’s disappearance would have made its way to us. We could continue to make utterances like “the sun sure is bright” even though in a strained sense of “talking about something” we are talking about nothing, since what we are talking about no longer exists and is, in this strained interpretation, nothing at all. Probably a better, less strained, thing to say is that we frequently talk about things that no longer exist and also things that never have and never will exist. So, the disappearance of the experiential thing in your example wouldn’t yield a case in which “we’d have nothing to talk about.” We’d have plenty to talk about.
If someone says we can have knowledge of a mind-independent reality, it's not trivial to say, "No, you Kant".
Would you please explain why it isn’t trivial?
What I mean is, we're not as logical as we like to think (nor should we be, but life will go a lot smoother if we can recognize that about ourselves). I'm not disagreeing with you on the logic, the point may very well be a tautology, but it's one many people, even very intelligent rational people, find shocking and deeply disturbing. Some will even get angry when you point it out to them because they think of themselves as purely rational, only persuaded by logical arguments, so how could they have believed in this absurdity?
Maybe for many people the right answer to the question “how could they have believed in this absurdity?” Is: “they didn’t, they never have, and it’s supremely uncharitable to interpret them as having believed in something that’s plainly contradictory.” If someone who you know has been divorced 3 times announced “I am going to marry someone who is unmarried,” are you going to interpret them as saying something contradictory (“I will become married to someone who is at the same time not married at all”) or something non-contradictory (“I will become married to someone who, unlike me, has never before been married”)? Charity favors the first interpretation. Imagine someone who not only defends the second interpretation, but goes on and writes long books about it. There’s an absurdity.
Sorry, I should have made it clearer that I meant that "how could they have believed in this absurdity" from their own perspective, not mine.
If you can point me to any such people, I’d love to see for myself the textual evidence of such self-attributions of contradiction.
I don't mean anyone self-attributes contradictory beliefs and I think you know that. We can believe in logical contradictions without realizing it and we can continue to believe even while recognizing it enough for it to make us uncomfortable on some level. When someone points out to us that we're not being logical, that doesn't necessarily mean we instantly change our minds or give up our illogical position. Nor should we. Logic is a tool, and it's one that can be misused. We have every right to take our time and be suspicious of an argument that upends everything we formerly believed to be true, regardless of how airtight the logic seems. Please don't act like you have no clue what I'm talking about. You're smarter than that.
Bravo, Pete!
One small point of disagreement or clarification, perhaps.
> Doxastic appearances are appearances enough. I don’t see any way around the fact that there are always going to be some beliefs or other that we have without being able to give a bullshit-free account of why we have them.
I agree that these sorts of justifications have to bottom out somewhere. But I don't think it's quite right to say that we cannot present an account of why we have these beliefs. Ultimately, we can give a sort of scientific third-person account of how human beliefs are formed, taking in neuroscience, evolutionary history and so on. This account will also explain why, by and large, these beliefs are formed reliably in the sorts of contexts where it was adaptive to be reliable.
Of course, the problem here is that we only get to our understanding of science via the very belief-forming apparatus we are attempting to justify, so this isn't a justification. It all ends up circular. But it is an account. It's a circular, self-consistent, self-supporting account. The circularity means it's not a free-standing justification. But the self-consistency means it is an account that at least might be true, and if true, then it explains why we believe as we do.
However, given that we have no choice but to use the belief-forming apparatus we have, then I think we might as well accept as an axiom that our belief forming apparatus is somewhat reliable at least for simple cases (because otherwise reasoning about anything is hopeless). And if we can reason reliably about simple cases then the hope is that we can break down complex problems into small steps such that we can figure those out too. Plausibly, then, the account of why we believe as we do can be justified with respect to that basic axiom.
i think you’re misreading my “we”. I’m not talking about, as you are, what we collectively can do, I’m talking about what’s the case for each person: for each person, there’s going to be some belief or other for which they won’t be able to tell you why they believe that. This is an empirical claim about people. It’s of course logically possible that there’s a person who can go around in big beautiful logically consistent circles for every belief they have, always having a non-confabulatory answer for why they believe each thing they believe. No one has yet met such a person.
I think I can give an account. It’s just coarse-grained. I believe that ball is blue because my visual system disposes me to form such a judgment, and my visual system disposes me to form such a judgment because it is adaptive to be able to form such judgments in some cases, and it is is adaptive to form such judgments in some cases because there really are things with surface reflectance properties that are tracked with such judgments, and those surface reflectance properties can be correlated with information that can give a survival advantage, and so tracking them reliably is an adaptive feature of human visual systems, so I can trust my visual system in typical cases, so the ball really does have the surface reflectance properties we track with words such as “blue”, “azure” and so on. And this whole picture is enabled because I can reason reasonably OK about simple stuff, because that too is adaptive.
The difference here between this and your Chicago example is that there is no such corresponding story there. It’s neither very obviously adaptive for someone to know what’s going on in Chicago, nor is there any plausible mechanism by which it is possible. So your Chicago point is good, and I have no major disagreement with you, I just think you’re going a little too far when you say that we’re always going to find beliefs for which no account can be given.
I guess I didn't really address your point fairly.
You're saying that just because I might be able to give an account like this for seeing a blue ball doesn't mean that I can always give an account like this for all my beliefs. And that's fair.
But I think that doesn't really matter for the larger point you're trying to make. If there were someone who could give a non-confabulatory answer for why they believe each thing they believe, it wouldn't defeat your point in this post at all, as far as I can see. So I just thought you went a little bit too far in suggesting that (or seeming to suggest that), in general, we can't have accounts for why we believe what we believe.
The point being that there's ways to justify a belief without an infinite regress or accepting that there is no account for some belief. Instead of suggesting that you're going to eventually have to give up and say "I don't know why I believe that", there is also the possibility of the kind of approach I'm suggesting.
Yes, this is all standard Aggripa’s Trilemma stuff. It wasn’t my intent to signal that there aren’t two other options.
Great read as always!
“Smith, you say you know the balls are different because you can see one is red and the other is blue. But how do you know THAT? How do you know you see one as red and the other as blue?”
How do I *know* that I see the ball is red? I have no choice in the matter: it simply and unequivocally appears red as a function of my perceptual set up. Its appearance isn't a conclusion drawn from more secure premises. Knowledge claims have to bottom out somewhere on pain of an epistemic regress and sensory qualities are exactly where they bottom out: epistemic primitives that can't be further justified since they are the basic qualitative terms in which the world appears to us conscious creatures, terms we aren't in an observational relation to but rather subjectively consist of as experiencers. They are exactly what cut off the "inner eye" regress you think bedevils the phenomenal realist.
The doxastic appearance you think disqualifies qualities is the challenge: “I don’t know why I believe that the ball is red, I just do”. But we know why: it appears red, where such an appearance is itself not an object of knowledge but simply a function of a recognitional, discriminative capacity that grounds beliefs such as the ball is red. We don't "know" red, we can only discriminate and report it as in reporting, truthfully, that we see the ball is red.
>Knowledge claims have to bottom out somewhere on pain of an epistemic regress and sensory qualities are exactly where they bottom out
I totally agree with this! As Professor Mandik wonderfully illustrates with his "Inside Out" criticism, infinite regress is impossible. Clearly human minds are operating with some sort of primitives. Why not call these qualia? Or if that term is too overloaded, call it something else. Now the nature of these primitives we can debate: are the "real" (whatever that means), or "illusionary" (whatever that means), etc. We can also debate whether there are non-sensory primitives, or if all primitives are sensory.
But the idea of primitives is a clear concept in my mind, and puts the idea of qualia on strong footing.
The ordinary word for this already exists - perceptions. The word is also a good starting point for developing more technical notions, like by separating interoception from exteroception, or by separating sounds from colors. Qualia meanwhile is only used in philosophy of mind and no one agrees whether the primary usage entails antiphysicalism or whether it's theory neutral or whether there are diet versions of it, propagating terminological understanding far and wide.
What is “perception” the ordinary word for? I know you said “this.” But I couldn’t tell what this is.
> Clearly human minds are operating with some sort of primitives. Why not call these qualia?
This is what I meant by "this," I think the rest of their comment is trying to sketch out "primitives" in some theory neutral way, and some theory neutral ordinary terminology would be "perceptions" rather than "qualia" or "primitives."
Ok, thanks. For what it’s worth I think it’s both far from obvious and outright implausible that there are mental primitives. Further, I think that if there were such things as mental primitives, perceptions would be poor candidates for them. The person you were replying to sounded to me like they had some super old-fashioned theory like Hume’s in mind, whereby simple sensory ideas are obtained as copies of sensory impressions and all other mental states are complexes somehow assembled from these copies.
So like: You can have many thoughts, but "thinking" isn't the right word, because what they meant to describe was the minimal capabilities needed to have a thought in the first place?
just like how Jones’s beliefs bottom out with Chicago. So either Chicago itself is a quale, (which is ridiculous) or so-called qualia aren’t helping rise to the challenge such cases as Jones’s help to articulate
I'd say Jones feeling about Chicago is a quale -- the mind primitive is not literally the same as the city. But perhaps I'm misunderstanding the example.
It's also worth considering that people can be mistaken, and therefore its reasonable to think people are mistaken about the source of judgement, which then throws the idea of a mind primitive in to doubt. I would say mind primitives happen how they happen, and then we analyze them using other mind primitives that don't fully capture the original. This isn't an infinite regress so much as an unfortunate but necessary limit to cognition. Maybe Jones doesn't know where his Chicago insight came from, but it came from somewhere.
yes, you are misunderstanding the example. jones has beliefs , not feelings, caused by chicago, smith has beliefs allegedly caused by qualia/feelings. why are smith’s beliefs about qualia/feelings justified but jones’s beliefs about chicago are not?
I see, thanks for the clarification. I think I could use some reading on thoughts, beliefs, judgements, as they supposedly relate (or don't) to qualia. The iep link might be a good place to start, thanks!
you say “appears”. Appears in what sense, phenomenal or doxastic?
Lets see... The world as we experience it appears in terms of the sensory qualities that populate conscious perceptual episodes: the ball uncontroversially appears red to me, so in terms of your dichotomy I'd say the ball's appearance is phenomenal, not doxastic. Its appearance leads me to report how it appears to me and perhaps to believe it's red (about which I might be mistaken given the lighting conditions, etc.) But the sensory qualities of conscious perceptual episodes don't appear to me; they are simply present, the constituents of my experience to which I'm not in an observational relationship as I am to the ball. I don't have a perspective on my red as I do the ball: my red isn't right or wrong or assessable in terms of accuracy conditions as is the claim that the ball is red. My recognition of red isn't knowledge in terms of it meeting a descriptive specification - it's simply the involuntary result of my perceptual set up. But that recognition participates in forming my (corrigible) beliefs about the world since the world appears in descriptive terms of it and other sensory qualities.
aside from just begging the question about there being phenomenal appearances, i don’t see how this supplies subjectively accessible justifiers to Smith in a way that wouldn’t also grant that Jones has subjectively accessible justification for his Chicago beliefs by stipulating that Jones is subjectively accessing Chicago.
I didn't beg the question about there being phenomenal appearances. I said the world appears phenomenally, so answered the question in the affirmative. And my point was that sensory qualities are not "subjectively accessible justifiers" since we don't access them; they are simply reliably present in consciousness in response to situations as our first line non-conceptual cognitive apparatus. The reason we credit Smith's belief that the ball appears red is because there are well known causal and perceptual mechanisms that reliably link luminance/reflectance properties of objects to sensory experiences involving color qualities that we all involuntarily recognize. We then form corrigible beliefs about the world on the basis of that recognition. Whereas there's no such story for what Jones believes about Chicago.
I can’t tell if your aim is to concede the point to the reliabilist or to defend Guy’s anti-reliabilist argument for non-doxastic appearances
A good way out of your circle of terms (e.g., qualia defined in terms of phenomena) is to start with an example of a quale. Here’s one: The color blue. What do our sciences have to say about blue? Well, since Galileo, we’ve understood that there’s nothing blue up there in the sky, that lazurite is made up of molecules whose only relation to blue is that it causes selective reflection of light waves at various frequencies, which result in blue experiences when received by typical human visual systems. The light is completely describable in terms of energies at various frequencies. The results in the human brain are completely describable in such terms as degrees of activation of neurons, patterns of activation of groups of neurons, or perhaps patterns of changes in electrical fields in the brain, or quantum collapses in microtubules, or . . . – in any case, some very complex physical events.
A serviceable definition of liquidity is something like ‘flows (seeks low level) if unconstrained’. When water is discovered to be composed of things that are not liquid, i.e., H2O molecules, there is an explanation of why water flows (when sufficiently warm). Roughly, there are then no strong bonds between H2O molecules, so there is no obstacle to their passing by each other as gravitational force pulls them downward.
There is no such definition of blue. (Do not say “It’s what typical humans experience when they look at cloudless skies, or lazurite, in daytime”. That’s an account of what causes blue experiences, not a definition of blue. The definition of liquidity says what it is, not what causes it.) So, there is no way of giving a parallel explanation of how blue relates to the physical world. It is this fact that gives rise to the idea in the first place, that blue (and colors in general, and even more generally, what Locke called ‘secondary qualities’) are not ordinary denizens of the physical world. ‘Quale’ is the philosophers’ term or art for such qualities. I won’t start in on my arguments against physicalist proposals about what instances of blue are identical with, or why they don’t exist at all; they are easy to find. I’ll just identify the question to which I think a dualist answer is the best: What do you do with blue?
Chisholm’s distinction can be most easily seen with ‘looks’. This is a visual term. Things can look differently in one lighting condition from the way they look in another. (Sellars’s example: A tie that looked blue in the bad fluorescent lighting of a shop, but looks green when taken outside.) In the non-doxastic sense of ‘looks’, a thing has to present a visual appearance of some kind. Of course, there is another sense of ‘looks’ that does not require anything visual. There is no way that bankruptcy (as such) affects one’s visual system, yet we easily understand someone who says ‘Bankruptcy looks imminent’, ‘It looks like the stock market will rise’. Even ‘It looks like rain” is not a report of anything that looks like (gives the visual appearance of) rain. What is visually appearing is dark clouds, not rain (yet). If it were actually raining, “It looks like rain” would be puzzling: is one a skeptic who suspects someone is dropping little globules of glass? Or a philosopher pontificating “It looks like rain, I have no reason to doubt my senses, so, very likely, it is rain”?
In short, Chisholm’s distinction is between a sense of ‘looks’ that requires visual appearance, and a sense of ‘looks’ that does not. It’s harder to state the point for ‘seems’, but that’s because seeming can apply to several of the senses (hearing, tasting, etc.) whereas ‘looks’ is definitely tied to visual appearance. But once the point is clear for ‘looks’, I think the generalization for ‘seems’ is obvious. E.g., a person could intelligibly say “It seems the sound is fading” while being in a soundproof room and reading a dial connected to a microphone that’s picking up sound some miles distant and converting the signal to an electronic driver of the dial. That’s different from a person’s use of the same words while listening to a radio station that is having a problem with its power source.
One final point concerning the first paragraph of your section ‘A Fantastic Voyage’. The answer you attribute to Smith in answer to “How do you know you see one as red and the other as blue” is “I introspect with my mind’s eye that I’m having distinctly visual qualia . . . and I can introspect that I’m having distinct visual qualia of phenomenal redness and phenomenal blueness”. This is a straw man attribution. The right answer is that if “how one knows” is assumed to involve a process that is, in effect, an inference, then there is no “How” involved here. Smith does not know he’s seeing a red and a blue ball by inference from anything else. But that does not mean there’s nothing more to be said. Smith knows he’s seeing one ball as red and one as blue because he’s learned his color words. It’s a matter of linguistic training. The red color in one’s experiences (for example) is the color of the experiences that one has when looking at certain crayons, bullfighter’s capes, ripe strawberries, male cardinals, and so forth – items that the adults from whom you learn color vocabulary say is ‘red’; and analogously for blue.
There must be some words that are learned like this, otherwise language could not get off the ground. (I think you’ll agree with this.)
Great post!
But I'm a bit puzzled. What's beyond adulthood?
Transcending the flesh through technological or magical means.
Cool. Gonna focus on that with my Ayahuasca shaman
happy transcendence!
I think there's an innocent reading of the phenomenal sense of "seeming." Take the Müller-Lyer illusion you mentioned - the lines seem unequal to you, but you're not convinced they actually are unequal. This applies even to philosophical zombies.
why must that be a reading of the so-called phenomenal sense instead of a plurality of doxastic seemings? I can think I’m going to pass the exam without being 100% certain; I can be inclined to believe P without fully believing P; and so on.
Of course he Kant
nooooo
have you read amy karofsky's 'a case for necessitarianism'? it's a banger that might change your mind about linda's necessary sunglassery.
If we narrow our equivalence criteria such that it's a different Linda at every moment, then we can necessitate *this* Linda (at this sunglasses-wearing moment) wearing sunglasses. Since all conceptual criteria are up to us and since modal operators can & should be relativized, there are necessitatarianism*s* (plural), some of which are true, some not, and none of them true in a way that pulverizes contingency universally.
2 years ago Amy was on Joe Schmid's channel, this was my reply then:
-=-=-=-=-
A few things that, when we remember them, it's easier to see how this all fits together:
(1) Possible[X] applies to whatever isn't ruled out in X, where X is some modality & scope. X can be metaphysical modality using George's metaphysic. X can be epistemic modality using Emma's data set. I noticed Joe at one point saying "genuinely, real possibilities -- the real, metaphysical possibility, the genuine possibility" and pitting that against mere "epistemic" possibility. We gotta watch out for bagpipes on that. First, one can reasonably affirm that epistemic possibility is the most genuine kind of possibility that we're dealing with here. Second, "metaphysical possibility" isn't some monolithic thing -- there is a completely distinct definition of possibility for each metaphysic one might use. To adapt our philosophical intuitions to "demote" metaphysical modality and "promote" epistemic modality in this way takes a pretty big mindshift.
(2) We can still talk about contingent relationships through our imagination about counterfactual (specifically false- or undefined-antecedent counterfactual) situations. We can imagine them like "holodecks." It's very useful for regret, learning, factor analysis, forecasting, etc. to do these exercises. All we have to do is remember that these events are either false (in the case of false-antecedent counterfactuals) or unknown (in the case of undefined-antecedent counterfactuals). The holodeck is calibrated with a specific scenario (either an epistemically possible one in our scope, or one known to be fictitious) and we test what plays out under that fantasy.
Once we remember 1 & 2, it's easy to see how necessitarianism may be true, but there's still contingent relationships strung through hypotheticals, and there's still genuine possibility (in the form of epistemic possibility).
Let's apply this to the die roll. Let's roll the die under a cup, and slam the cup down. We hear the die fall flat, but we don't know which face it's on. Here, we say that each face is possible -- exactly like if we hadn't rolled the die yet, with the same math. We lift the cup, and it's 3. Here, the "ghosts" of the other faces linger in our brains -- especially if they have ramifications (e.g., if I had gotten a 4 I would have won a game, and I was so close! It could have been 4!). But then we catch ourselves, remembering that the die roll, while chaotic, was a product of a storm of causes -- the speed of the shaking hand, the shape of the cup, the force of the slam, etc. If you add all those up, it could not have been otherwise, needless to say...
... UNLESS those upstream factors had been different! We can imagine they had been different ("if the shape of the cup had been more beveled") and this reopens the epistemic space ("then possibly other numbers would have resulted").
And therefore we can say something like: "Necessitarianism may be true, but possibilities are genuine in any epistemic suspense, so contingent thinking nevertheless has its use."
Excellent points, and very welcome ones. The following comment is not directed so much at you as at anyone else who might care what I do or don’t think about necessitarianism:
I didn’t mean to express that I have any beef with necessitarianism (or even a lack of interest in it) but the point I care about is one proven by the mere fact that Amy felt the need to write a whole book about it. It’s that there’s a distinction between statements that are true merely by being axioms or basic theorems in logical calculi, like “If P then P” and “necessarily if P then P” versus statements whose defense requires extra-logical material, like whether there are essences, or natural kinds, or anything at all. Treating the two sorts of statement as equivocal is fallacious. Anyway, see you at tomorrow’s sea battle!
hell no
I pretty much agree with all of this. (At least after I looked up "doxastic".)
"What if we could just identify phenomenal consciousness with appearances?"
This was me for a long time, and I'm still open to someone doing it. But now the question I always have for them is: do you still see a hard problem, explanatory gap, etc? If so, then what's making it so hard? The answer tends to bring back the objectionable stuff, often under different names.