A New Problem for Relationalism

Draft – do ot cite without per issio fro the author A New Problem for Relationalism T. Raja Rosenhagen, University of Pittsburgh (3000 words) Experience, if beliefs can affect it, is what I call doxastically variable. Relationalists hold, roughly, that experience is a relation between subjects and mind-independent items from a point of view.1 In what follows, I raise a new problem for relationalism and sketch an alternative. The problem is this: relationalists cannot accommodate certain varieties of doxastic variability. I proceed by presenting and rejecting Bill Fish’s relationalist attempt to accommodate doxastic variability. It is inconsistent, I argue, with his commitment to the thought that the acquaintance relation is irreducible. Even bracketing this, I show that Fish can only accommodate some varieties of doxastic variability, not others. This, I argue, holds of relationalism generally. Ultimately, this incapability springs from their defining tenet: experience’s central function is to relate us with mindindependent environing items. I think we must reject this tenet. Relationalists will thus not like the alternative I sketch in the end. But it succeeds where relationalism fails. Thus: so much the worse for the relationalists. 1. Preliminaries Accommodating doxastic variability is a challenge every account of experience faces. However, relationalism, as we will see, is particularly ill-poised to meet it.2 But why worry about doxastic variability to begin with? In response, I claim that the assumption that experience is doxastically variable is deeply entrenched. Does what we believe affect how we see the world? Most nonphilosophers, I predict, will answer in the affirmative. In philosophy, too, the idea is widespread. Many 1 2 As is common, I take “relationalism” and “naïve realism” to be alternative names for the same theory of the conscious character of experience. I cannot elaborate on this here, but many versions of representationalism cannot properly accommodate doxastic variability either. The trouble, briefly put, is this: if false, irrational, and unjustified beliefs can modify the representational content of experience, such modification would undermine what many representationalists take to be experience’s rational role: justifying belief. Draft – do ot cite without per issio fro the author philosophers of science grant that scientific observation is theory-laden.3 Many philosophers working on moral perception assume that our background beliefs affect the way we see others and their actions – an assumption, incidentally, that is also prevalent in certain schools of Buddhism.4 In philosophy of art, it is a common-place that our beliefs, e.g. about art in general, affect how we see an artist’s work, and if we truly see it.5 Moreover, in philosophy of psychology, feminist epistemology, social philosophy, philosophy of race, gender, and queer studies, the assumption that ideology manages experience is typically just taken for granted – think, e.g., of implicit bias.6 Finally, the debate on the so-called cognitive penetrability of perception, which concerns the question whether and how cognitive states, including beliefs, affect experience, is in full swing, attracting the attention of philosophers of mind, epistemologists, and cognitive scientists alike.7 In sum, the idea that experience is doxastically variable is both intuitive and prevalent in various areas of philosophy and beyond. If one proposes an account of experience, one had better try to accommodate the issue. Before we look at how relationalists fail, we must get clearer on what relationalism is. Relationalism’s central tenet is this: experience, on its most fundamental characterization, is a three-place relation of conscious acquaintance that is said to obtain between subjects and particular environing mind-independent items from a point of view. This third relatum, the “point of view” or “standpoint” comprises a variety of features, e.g. the subject’s spatiotemporal position vis-à-vis environing items, and the specific circumstances of perception, e.g. lighting conditions. 3 4 5 6 7 For an early account of theory-ladenness, see Hanson 1958, 1969. For an analysis of Hanson’s view, see (reference omitted). See e.g. Murdoch 1970; Garfield 2015, ch. 8; Heim 2015; and Buddhaghosa 1991. A classic, though by no means atypical example is Bourdieu 1984, who argues that art perception involves a (typically unconscious) deciphering operation that is shaped by the perceiver’s cultural upbringing. It is natural to assume that ideology involves, perhaps besides other things, beliefs. Tommie Shelby 2003 e.g. thinks so, Sally Haslanger 2016 responds by claiming that ideology is, perhaps primarily, a matter of practice. We need not take sides, for surely, ideology has more than one way of perpetuating itself. If, as many believe, beliefs are a part of ideology, it is plausible that what is taken for granted in the relevant discourse is some form of doxastic variability or other. See Raftopoulos & Zeimbekis 2015 for a variety of contributions to the topic, also Stokes 2013; Siegel 2012, 2015, and 2017; for contributions inspired by theorizing about the cognitive sciences see Hohwy 2013 and the exchange between Gary Lupyan and Fiona Macpherson in Lupyan 2015a, 2015b, Macpherson 2015, also Macpherson 2017. For a recent critical voice regarding cognitive penetrability see Scholl & Firestone 2016. Draft – do ot cite without per issio fro the author Through being related to us, objects reveal their shapes and colors, their “qualitative features” are “brought into the subjective life” of the perceiver [Campbell & Cassam 2014, ch. 1]. Acquaintance is conscious. Having an experience is inevitably accompanied by a phenomenology or a way it is like to undergo it. As per an oft-quoted passage from Campbell, it is the environing items themselves that constitute this phenomenal character: On a Relational View, the phenomenal character of your experience, as you look around the room, is constituted by the actual layout of the room itself: which particular objects are there, their intrinsic properties, such as colour and shape, and how they are arranged in relation to one another and to you. [Campbell 2002, 116; similarly: French 2014, 395-6; Logue 2012, 212; Martin 1998, 173-5] With this sketch in hand, let us distinguish two different forms doxastic variability can assume: Variable Content (VC) Variable Phenomenology (VP) beliefs affect the representational content of experience beliefs affect the phenomenology of experience In the absence of a context provided by a specific account of experience, VC and VP are both conceivable and could be spelled out and combined in various ways. Relationalism, however, is strongly opposed to representationalism, the view that experience has representational content. Again, relationalists take experience to be a relation, which simply does not involve content. It is thus simply entailed by the relationalists’ construal of experience that for them, the challenge of accommodating VC does not arise. Effects of beliefs on content cannot target experience itself, for experience lacks content. At best, such effects could target contentful items associated with experience – perceptual jugdments, say. With respect to VP, however, relationalists must take a stand. In the following section, I show that Fish’s account, and relationalism generally, is structurally barred from accommodating certain forms VP could assume. 2. Why Fish, Brewer, and Relationalists Generally Fail Fish agrees that the conscious visual character of visual perception is constituted by external items. Here is how he puts it: Draft – do ot cite without per issio fro the author [W]hen we see, external objects and their properties “shape the contours of the subject’s conscious experience” (Martin 2004: 64), where the metaphor of ‘shaping’ is read in a constitutive rather than a merely causal sense.[…] [E]xternal objects and their properties shape the contours of the subject’s conscious experience […] by actually being the contours of the subject’s conscious experience. [Fish 2009, 6]8 The notion of phenomenal character is often glossed in terms of ‘what it’s like’ for a subject to undergo a given experience. Following Alex Byrne’s suggestion, Fish understands the phenomenal character of experience as “that property of experience that types it according to what it is like to have it” [9, citing Byrne 2002: 9 and Chalmers 2006: 50]. Phenomenal character is composite: experiences that differ in their overall phenomenal character may share phenomenal properties; in some respects, what it’s like to have them may be the same. If one takes the phenomenal character to be constituted by external objects and properties, it may seem as if the properties the phenomenal character comprises must be properties not of experience itself, but of the constituting items. To address this issue, Fish, following Chalmers (Chalmers 2004: 156), distinguishes phenomenal from presentational properties. Phenomenal properties are properties of experiences that type them according to what it’s like to undergo them. Presentational properties are properties “that are, or at least seem to be, presented to the subject of experience and thereby characterize what it is like to be in the experiential state.” [12, 16] Qua relationalist, Fish rejects that experiences have the property of representing that the constituent elements of the presentational character are instantiated, where this representational property is then identified with the phenomenal character of experience. For on such a view, two experiences could be identical with respect to their representational properties and, thus, their phenomenal character, yet differ in that only in one of them, the properties the experience represents as being instantiated are indeed presented to the subject. If this were allowed, it would seem as if, pace relationalism, it is not the mind-independent items in the subject’s environment themselves that constitute an experience’s phenomenal character, but its representational properties. Henceforth, parenthetical references to pages are references to Fish 2009 unless indicated otherwise. Draft – do ot cite without per issio fro the author On Fish’s view, then, the presentational character is what the experience presents the subject with – the perceived scene itself. And the phenomenal character of experience is the subject’s being acquainted with the elements of the presentational character. Here is how he puts it: [A]cquaintance names an irreducible mental relation that the subject can only stand in to objects that exist and features that are instantiated in the part of the environment at which the subject is looking. […] Thus, for any given presentational character—the array of features that the subject is presented with in having that experience—the experience itself will have the property of acquainting the subject with that presentational character. […] This acquaintance property can […] be identified with the experience’s phenomenal character. [14-15] Fish’s view thus comprises two theses. 1) Primitive Acquaintance: Acquaintance is an irreducible mental relation. Whenever presented with a given presentational character, the subject’s experience has the property of acquainting the subject with it. 2) Identity: The property of acquainting a subject with the presentational character of her experience is identical with that experience’s phenomenal character. The basic units featuring in presentational character, Fish suggests, are object-property couples.9 He calls such couples facts. Facts, however, are not true propositions, but necessarily actual pieces of reality, states of affairs – either of the form “a’s being F” or (for relational facts) “a’s R-ing b” [52] – that can serve as truth-makers. Which facts constitute the presentational character, Fish holds, depends on the subject’s position vis-à-vis environing objects, on her visual acuity [55], and on the distribution of her attentional resources [58-64]. Further, Fish maintains that for one to become acquainted with a particular fact, or to have a particular fact feature in the presentational character of one’s experience, one must have the capacity to see that fact or, more broadly, facts of that kind. [67]. Drawing on an example from Crane 1992, Fish asserts that the trained physicist can get acquainted with the fact that the object in front of her is a cathode ray tube.10 The untutored child, however, 9 10 Fish draws on arguments by Matthen 2005 and Firth 1949 to the effect that neither objects nor properties can appear in experience solo. We cannot perceive objects without properties, nor properties that are not of objects. Basically, the same example also features prominently in Hanson 1958. Draft – do ot cite without per issio fro the author cannot. The capacity the physicists has and that the child lacks, Fish suggests, is a conceptual visualrecognitional capacity. It is a visual-recognitional capacity because it is “a capacity to recognize, through vision, certain features in the world,” and a “a conceptual capacity because possession of the capacity requires the subject to possess the relevant concept” [68-69, emphases added]. Fish adds two concessions: first, the physicist and the child also have something perceptually in common. Here is his explanation: the presentational character of both features shape facts, color facts, etc. – facts, that is, that both the physicist and the child can get acquainted with. Second, a substantive story must be told what it is to have a conceptual capacity. Fish does not provide one, but notes that having such a capacity may require mastery of a language that contains the relevant term, viz. “cathode ray tube” [69], and, following Noë 2004, to have a range of tacit expectations as to how the appearances of certain objects will change under movement [ibid.]. Having a conceptual capacity thus is construed as a matter of possessing several capacities that must cooperate in the right kind of way. But does acquaintance generally require that the subject have conceptual capacities? Fish affirms this. Modifying a claim by McDowell, he claims the following: In experience one finds oneself saddled with presentational character. One’s conceptual capacities have already been brought into play, in the presentational character’s being available to one, before one has any choice in the matter. [71]11 Thus, Fish maintains that the capacity to perceive facts is a conceptual-recognitional capacity. However, against McDowell and following Kirk 2005, he holds that for subjects to have experiences with phenomenal character requires that the deliveries of their discriminatory capacities be suitably linked up with other general cognitive systems, but not that the subject be also a language user [73-4]. Accordingly, he thinks that some, but not all conceptual capacities presuppose language possession. 11 Fish cites McDowell 1994: 10, who makes the same claim but has “content” where the passage above has “presentational character”. Fish then says the following: ”Substitute “presentational character” for ”content” here, and I fully endorse McDowell’s claim” [71]. The result is the passage given above. Fish also discusses, but rejects, the possibility that “our capacities to see certain rudimentary facts, including e.g. facts about shape and color, are not conceptual-recognitional capacities at all” and that instead “subjects have the capacity to see such facts simply in virtue of having, say, a fully functional visual system” [72]. Draft – do ot cite without per issio fro the author To emphasize: concepts, Fish thinks, co-determine which facts a subject’s presentational character contains. Plausibly, on a Kirkean view, too, possession at least of sophisticated concepts, e.g. cathode ray tube, will require that the subject hold certain beliefs, e.g. about what cathode ray tubes are or do. At least in such cases, possessing concepts is thus partly a matter of having certain beliefs. Put differently, our beliefs co-determine which concepts and conceptual-recognitional capacities we have available. This in turn co-determines which facts feature in the presentational character of our experience and are thus available for us to get acquainted with. According to Identity, the property of acquainting a subject with the presentational character of her experience is identical with her experience’s phenomenal character. Beliefs can thus affect the phenomenal character of experience. I think that it is a virtue of Fish’s view that he can accommodate phenomena like e.g. expert vision: knowing enables recognizing cathode ray tubes, which may make a phenomenal difference. However, there is a price. For allowing this variety of doxastic variability seems at odds with Primitive Acquaintance, i.e. the view that acquaintance is irreducibly primitive. Again, acquaintance is supposed to be a relation between the subject and the facts featuring in the presentational character of her experience. As it turns out, two subjects can look at the same tract of the environment, from the same point of view, have the same visual acuity and distribute their attention in the same kind of way, and yet differ in what their experience acquaints them with. The property of being acquainted with certain facts is further reducible. It partly depends on, and can be explained in terms of, what beliefs and concepts are at the subject’s disposal. Perhaps this can be side-stepped. Fish might give an account on which the relevant irreducibility is not explanatory, but of some other kind, and that it obtains even if what we are, in experience, acquainted with depends partly on belief. So far, such an account is pending. However, there is an even bigger problem: there is a large group of conceivable effects that Fish is in principle barred from accommodating. For instance, it may be that our knowledgeable belief that bananas are typically yellow may bring it about that we see depictions of bananas whose colors is monochromatic gray as still Draft – do ot cite without per issio fro the author slightly yellow.12 Also, it may be that individuals scoring high on IATs, if faced with faces of Black men, have experiences whose phenomenal character is affected so as to make these faces look threatening. Beliefs, Fish grants, can affect phenomenology, mediated via concepts and their effect on what facts feature in the presentational character. But for him, what can so feature is constrained by what is actually there to be seen. Accordingly, effects on the phenomenal character of experience must be similarly limited. This limitation is not idiosyncratic to Fish. It besets other views, too. Bill Brewer, for example, distinguishes thin looks from thick looks. Thin looks are looks objects are said to have due to being relevantly similar, relative to a point of view and circumstances of perception, to paradigm examples of certain kinds. Thick looks, on the other hand, are thin looks that are being registered by the subject. Such registration, Brewer suggests, may involve recognition (Brewer 2011: 120-4), which may in turn modify the experience’s phenomenal character. Again, such recognitional effects plausibly depend on the subject’s concepts and beliefs. Like Fish, who claims that what facts feature in the presentational character of one’s experience depends on one’s concepts and beliefs, Brewer claims that which of the thin looks that objects anyway have subjects register depends on their concepts and beliefs. Note, however, that on Brewer’s view, objects can only thickly look F if they also thinly look F. How things thinly look, though, is said to be belief-independent. Thus, Brewer, too, is saddled with the view that effects concepts and beliefs may have on phenomenal character of experience are limited to registering thin looks objects anyway have. On both views, effects like the banana effect and biased facial perception are thus impossible!13 This generalizes to every recognizably relationalist position. Recall relationalism’s central tenet: experience puts us in touch with mind-independent items. Accommodating recognitional effects on the phenomenal character, such as expert vision, is 12 13 See Hansen et al. 2006 and Olkkonen et al. 2008 for empirical results that substantiate this possibility, as do many of the empirical cases that are proposed as putative cases of cognitive penetration. Note, however, that Brewer thinks that we are acquainted with objects’ thin looks. In contrast to Fish, he can thus easily hold on to the idea that acquaintance is a primitive relation which is thus construed as prior to the involvement of concepts, which come in only once registration occurs, i.e. on the level of thick looks. See Brewer (forthcoming). Draft – do ot cite without per issio fro the author compatible with experience playing that role. For all the possession of the relevant conceptual recognitional-capacities does is put us in touch with facts that do in fact obtain. But the banana effect and the biased facial perception effect are examples of effects in which experience does not play this role. Therefore, relationalists, to uphold their characterization of experience’s fundamental role, cannot accommodate such cases. This result is unsatisfactory at best. An account of perceptual experience should not be hostage to empirical results. However, an alternative is available. 3. The Alternative Here is a very brief sketch of the alternative.14 The crucial move is to reject the relationalist tenet that experience’s main function is to relate us to mind-independent items. Experience no doubt does that, often even, but doing so is not its defining feature.15 Instead, I suggest, its main role is to make rational transitions to perceptual judgments. Which transitions are made rational depends on the subject’s background view. Such a view contains beliefs, but also view-specific linkages that rationally connect possible experiences with perceptual judgments. To illustrate, consider the Müller-Lyer illusion. Suppose you see it, but don’t know it. You may see the two lines featured in the phenomenal character of your experience as unequal in length, and judge that they are. This judgment is false. Still, transitioning to it may well be rational, given what you think you know. Suppose, next, you see, the illusion, knowing it. You may still see the lines as unequal 14 15 Elsewhere, I have argued extensively that we can extract the beginnings of such a view in the remarks on empirical constraint and illusions that are part of Norwood Russell Hanson’s early and unduly neglected account of the theoryladenness of observation [reference omitted]. More recently, Anil Gupta has forcefully argued for a conception of experience’s rational role that is very much in line with what I find in Hanson [see Gupta 2006 and Gupta forthcoming]. Most pertinent to the topic at hand are Gupta’s reflections on what he calls the hypothetical given. Incidentally, I also reject a conception that is widespread among representationalists, i.e. that the crucial function of experience is to justify beliefs. Experience may allow us to justify our beliefs, often even, but again, it is not its defining feature. As I indicate in fn. 2, such a conception, too, fails to properly accommodate the idea that experience may be doxastically variable. Or rather, if such a conception is embraced, it follows that the rational role of experience may, unbeknownst to the experiencing subjects, be seriously undermined, namely whenever false, irrational, or unjustified beliefs affect the representational content representationalists think experience possesses. On the conception I advocate, however, the rational role of experience remains unimpaired even if experience is doxastically variable in both senses distinguished above (VC and VP). Draft – do ot cite without per issio fro the author in length. But given what you know, your experience now makes rational the transition to a different judgment, namely: the two lines are equal in length. Again, which transitions a given experience makes rational is view-specific. Mind-independent objects, I grant, typically do play a role in constituting the phenomenal character of experience. As you see the Müller-Lyer illusion, the two lines do co-constitute the phenomenal character of your experience. But so may concepts, beliefs, desires, hopes or moods, say. Crucially, though, even if they do, the rational role of experience remains unimpaired: there are always judgments that an experience, given a view, makes it rational to transition to. In the VP cases alludes to above, too: given your phenomenology and your view, you may rationally transition to judging that the banana is slightly yellow, or that the Black faces look threatening, though both judgments are false.16 In sum, the view I propose succeeds in accommodating all cases of doxastic variability, while keeping the rational role of experience intact.17 Relationalism, however, does and indeed cannot. We should reject it. REFERENCES: Bourdieu, P. (1984). Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception. In: Pierre Bourdieu: The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Columbia University Press. Brewer, B. (2011). Perception and its Objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ---(forthcoming). Perceptual Experience and Empirical Reason. Analytic Philosophy. 17 The biased perception case may seem more controversial. But here, too, I would insist that given a certain background view, it may be perfectly rational to transition to the judgment that the Black faces one looks at look threatening. Of course, ex hypothesi, this judgment is false. Yet given the biased subject’s view, transitioning to it may be rational. Incidentally, this is perfectly compatible with thinking that we are within our rights, as we may well be, to blame the experiencing subject for allotting too little weight, in her view, to the possibility that she may be biased. Note that I have said nothing about what experience is. This is studied. 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