Perception, Knowledge, and Belief

This collection of essays by eminent philosopher Fred Dretske brings

together work on the theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind spanning thirty years. The two areas combine to lay the groundwork for a
naturalistic philosophy of mind.
The fifteen essays focus on perception, knowledge, and consciousness.
Together, they show the interconnectedness of Dretske's work in epistemology and his more contemporary ideas on philosophy of mind, shedding light on the links that can be made between the two. The first part
of the book argues the point that knowledge consists of beliefs with the
right objective connection to facts; two essays discuss this conception of
knowledge's implications for naturalism. The second part articulates a
view of perception, attempting to distinguish conceptual states from phenomenal states. A naturalized philosophy of mind, and thus a naturalized
epistemology, is articulated in the third part.
This collection will be a valuable resource for a wide range of philosophers and their students, and will also be of interest to cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of biology.
Fred Dretske is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Stanford University
and is currently senior research scholar at Duke University. He is the
author of four other books.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

General editor ERNEST SOSA (Brown University)

Advisory editors:
JONATHAN DANCY (University of Reading)
JOHN HALDANE (University of St. Andrews)
GILBERT HARM AN (Princeton University)
FRANK JACKSON (Australian National University)
WILLIAM G. LYCAN (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
SYDNEY SHOEMAKER (Cornell University)
JUDITH j . THOMSON (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
RECENT TITLES:
Explaining Attitudes
ROBERT A. WILSON Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds
BARRY MAUND Colours
LYNNE RUDDER BAKER

MICHAEL DEVITT Coming to Our Senses

MICHAEL Z I M M E R M A N The Concept of Moral Obligation

MICHAEL STOCKER with ELIZABETH HEGEMAN Valuing Emotions

SYDNEY SHOEMAKER The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays

NORTON NELKIN Consciousness and the Origins of Thought

MARK LANCE and JOHN O'LEARY HAWTHORNE The Grammar of Meaning
D. M. ARMSTRONG A World of State of Affairs
PIERRE JACOB What Minds Can Do
A N D R E GALLOIS The World Without, the Mind Within

FRED FELDMAN Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert

LAURENCE B O N J O U R In Defense of Pure Reason
DAVID LEWIS Papers in Philosophical Logic
WAYNE DAVIS Implicature

DAVID COCKBURN Other Times

DAVID LEWIS Papers on Metaphysics and Epistemology
RAYMOND MARTIN Self-Concern
ANNETTE BARNES Seeing Through Self-Deception
MICHAEL B R A T M A N Faces of Intention
AMIE T H O M A S S O N Fiction and Metaphysics
DAVID LEWIS Papers on Ethics and Social Philosophy

Perception, Knowledge, and Belief

Selected Essays

FRED DRETSKE
Stanford University

Hi CAMBRIDGE
WW UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Fred Dretske 2000
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Dretske, Fred I.
Perception, knowledge, and belief: selected essays / Fred
Dretske.
p. cm. (Cambridge studies in philosophy)
ISBN 0-521-77181-1. - ISBN 0-521-77742-9 (pbk.)
1. Knowledge, Theory of. 2. Philosophy of mind. I. Title.
II. Series.
BD161.D73 2000
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99-15973
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ISBN 0 521 77181 1 hardback
ISBN 0 521 77742 9 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2003

Contents

Preface

Part One

page ix

Knowledge

Conclusive Reasons

2
3
4
5

Epistemic Operators
The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge
The Epistemology of Belief
Two Conceptions of Knowledge: Rational vs. Reliable
Belief

30
48
64
80

Part Two Perception and Experience

6
7
8
9
10

Simple Seeing
Conscious Experience
Differences That Make No Difference
The Mind's Awareness of Itself
What Good Is Consciousness?

97
113
138
158
178

Part Three Thought and Intentionality

11
12

Putting Information to Work

If You Can't Make One, You Don't Know How It
Works
13 The Nature of Thought

vu

195
208
227

14
15

Norms, History, and the Constitution of the Mental

Minds, Machines, and Money: What Really Explains
Behavior

Index

242
259
275

vin

Preface

These fifteen essays span almost thirty years from 1970 (Epistemic
Operators) to 1999 (The Mind's Awareness of Itself). They record a
growing preoccupation with the mind's material constitution. I think of
them as steps, sometimes very halting and uncertain steps, toward philosophical naturalism about the mind.
I began by worrying about very traditional epistemological questions.
What makes a belief that something is F into knowledge that it is F?
What makes an F-like experience a perception of an F? As the concept
of information began to dominate my thinking about epistemology
(circa 1980), I pursued naturalistic answers to these questions without
pausing to ask what makes a belief a belief or an experience an experience. Knowledge was analyzed as information-caused belief. Perception
was identified with (a particular kind of) information-carrying experience. In Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981) I had argued that
semantic information what information (news, message) a signal carries
can be understood as an objective, a completely natural, commodity.
It was as acceptable in a materialistic metaphysics as was the statistical
construct of information employed by communications engineers. I
therefore had, or so I thought, a naturalized epistemology. Knowledge
and perception were merely specialized informational states in certain
living organisms. I soon realized, however, that as long as I had no
acceptable (i.e., naturalistic) account of belief, I had no acceptable account of knowledge. Until I could say what an experience was, I had no
materialistic recipe for perception. If perception of an F is an information
(about F)-rich experience, what, exactly, is an experience? If knowledge
is information-caused belief, what, then, is a belief? Until I had answers
to these questions, I had no answers to questions I expected an adequate

IX

epistemology to provide for example, do machines (e.g., computers

and robots) know things? Do measuring instruments and sensing devices
(e.g., thermostats and pressure gauges) perceive the conditions they provide information about? What about animals? Does a frog see the flies it
catches? Does it know they are flies? That will depend, of course, on
whether the information the frog so obviously gets about the flies is
embodied in beliefs and experiences.
Naturalism in philosophy as I understand it has the goal of
articulating the application conditions of puzzling concepts (like knowledge and perception) so that empirical (scientific) methods can be used to
answer questions we have about the things to which we apply these
concepts. Until we reach this point of clarity in what we are talking
about, there is a suspicion that we philosophers do not really know
what we are talking about thus the (seemingly) endless philosophical
debates about (for example) skepticism. Naturalism in epistemology is
merely the attempt to get clear enough about what we mean when we
talk about knowledge and perception to be able to tell in ways a
biologist or an experimental psychologist would recognize as scientifically respectable whether what we are saying is true or not.
It was for this reason that I came to view my information-based
naturalization of knowledge and perception as inadequate. It left belief
and experience as part of the mix, and I had no naturalistic recipe for
either of these ingredients. Until I knew what a belief was, I could not
say whether machines or frogs knew or perceived anything. I could not
assess the skeptic's claim that we cannot know to be true most (all?) the
things we believe to be true. Until I could say what an experience was,
I had no defensible way of denying (or affirming) that robots actually
perceive the obstacles they so expertly avoid. Even a lowly thermostat
picks up and uses (to control the furnace) information about temperature. So why doesn't this qualify as perception and cognition? Because
the instrument doesn't have experiences and beliefs? Just what are these?
I had, furthermore, no grounds for saying (what we all believe) that in
everyday perception what we experience (perceive) are rocks, trees, and
(other) people and not (as some philosophers claim) something altogether different - mental representations (ideas) of these external objects.
It was a growing awareness of these lacunae in my epistemology that
drove me into philosophy of mind. One can certainly do epistemology
without doing the philosophy of mind, but one cannot hope to naturalize the one without naturalizing the other.
This shift was gradual. Early essays on knowledge (1 and 2) are more

concerned to argue that knowledge consists of belief with the right

objective connection to the facts (a connection I later described in
informational terms). By completely eschewing such traditional (but, to
my mind, unhelpful) concepts as justification, evidence, and reasons, the
hope was to make knowledge (like, say, weight or marital status) something more accessible to empirical methods. Assuming we could determine the presence of an appropriate belief, was it connected to the facts
in the right way? Essays 1 and 3 are attempts to specify this "right" way.
"Epistemic Operators" (Essay 2) is included because of its muchdiscussed argument against skepticism. Essays 4 and 5 are more explicit
in the way they describe this conception of knowledge and its implications for the naturalistic project.
The essays in Part Two, Perception and Experience, cover twenty
years. Essay 6 articulates a view of perception I first advanced in Seeing
and Knowing (1969) and that I have defended against a variety of objections (e.g., Virgil Aldrich in Essay 6, Dan Dennett in Essay 8, and David
Armstrong and others in Essay 7). Essays 9 and 10 attempt to describe
the nature of conscious experience and its evolutionary function. Collectively, these five essays are my best effort to distinguish conceptual
states belief, judgment, and knowledge from phenomenal states
sensations, experiences, and feelings. One cannot believe, judge, or
know (conceptual states) that an animal is an armadillo without understanding what an armadillo is without, in this way, having the concept
armadillo but one can see, feel, taste, and be aware (conscious) of an
armadillo while being completely ignorant of what armadillos are or of
what they look (taste, feel) like. For a naturalization project, then, there
are really two problems about the mind: what sorts of material states are
phenomenal states (today this is often referred to as the hard problem of
consciousness) and what sorts of material states are conceptual states?
Some philosophers have thought to deny that there are two problems thereby making the naturalization of conscious experience a more tractable problem by identifying experience with a special kind of judgment. I think this is a profound mistake. It makes things easier, but only
by suppressing one of the most baffling - but, at the same time, one of
the most distinctively mental aspects of our conscious lives. The essays
in this part are my effort to insist on and further clarify this important
distinction.
Part Three, Thought and Intentionality, are my latest efforts to articulate and defend a naturalized philosophy of mind and, thus, a naturalized epistemology. In Essay 111 argue that information (not just the

XI

signals that carry it) can do some real causal work in the world. This is,
I believe, a first step in understanding how the mind (the chief consumer
of information) can be causally efficacious in the world and how information can direct its activities. Only by understanding this, I feel, can
one appreciate the role that reasons play in the explanation of behavior.
I return to this theme again in Essay 15 by comparing the way beliefs
explain the behavior of animals to the way money explains the behavior
of vending machines. Essay 12 is a blunt I'm sure some will find it
crude expression of my naturalistic philosophy of mind.

xn

Part One
Knowledge

1
Conclusive Reasons

Conclusive reasons have a modal as well as an epistemic character. In

having conclusive reasons to believe that P is the case one's epistemic
credentials are such as to eliminate the possibility of mistake. This, at
least, is how I propose to understand them for the remainder of this
essay. Letting the symbol "()" represent the appropriate modality (a yet
to be clarified sense of possibility), I shall say, then, that R is a conclusive
reason for P if and only if, given R, ~ () ~ P (or, alternatively, ~ ()
(R. ~ P)). This interpretation allows us to say of any subject, S, who
believes that P and who has conclusive reasons for believing that P, that,
given these reasons, he could not be wrong about P or, given these reasons,
it is false that he might be mistaken about P.
Suppose, then, that
(1) S knows that P and he knows this on the basis (simply) of R entails
(2) R would not be the case unless P were the case.1
The latter formula expresses a connection between R and P that is
strong enough, I submit, to permit us to say that if (2) is true, then R is
a conclusive reason for P. For if (2) is true, we are entitled not only to
deny that, given R, not-P is the case, but also that, given R, not-P might
be the case. That is to say, (2) eliminates R and not-P as a possible
Reprinted From Australasian Journal of Philosophy 49, (1) (1971) 1-22, by permission of the
publisher. An early version of this essay was read to the Philosophy Department at The
University of Illinois, Chicago Circle. More recently it was read at The University of
North Carolina's Colloquium in Philosophy, with Professor Robert Sleigh commenting.
I shall be using "R" and "P" to replace a variety of related grammatical units. Depending
on the sentential context, they sometimes serve as noun phrases, sometimes as full indicative
sentences, sometimes for appropriate transformations of the indicative.

(joint) state of affairs and, when we are given R, it eliminates not-P as a

possible state of affairs. This is so because (2) entails the falsity of
(3) Although R is the case P might not be the case.
If we express (3) as "Given R, () ~ P," then (2) entails that it is false
that, given R, () ~ P that is equivalent to, given R, ~ () ~ P; and this
is precisely the required feature of conclusive reasons given previously.
Hence, when (2) is true, R is a conclusive reason for P.
What follows is an amplification of the preceding sketch hence, an
argument for the view that in those cases where knowledge that P rests
on evidence, grounds, or reasons, when the question "How does S
know?" can sensibly be asked and answered, the evidence, grounds, or
reasons must be conclusive. Anything short of conclusive reasons,
though it may provide one with justified true beliefs, fails to give the
kind of support requisite to knowledge. I shall also urge that the possession of conclusive reasons to believe, properly qualified, is also a sufficient condition for knowledge.

1. KNOWING P ON THE BASIS OF R: THE CONNECTION

BETWEEN (1) AND (2)

Suppose S, in order to assure himself that his child's temperature is

normal (no fever), places a thermometer in the child's mouth, extracts it
after several minutes, and observes a reading of 98.6F. In remarking to
the doctor that his child's temperature is normal, S is asked how he
knows. S responds, naturally enough, by saying, "I just took his temperature." Let us assume, then, that we have an instantiation of (1):
(la) S knows that his child's temperature is normal, and he knows this on the
basis of the (normal) reading on the thermometer (which he has just placed
in the child's mouth, etc.).
Can one consistently affirm (la) and deny the corresponding instantiation of (2)?
(2a) The thermometer would not have read 98.6F unless the child's temperature was normal.
If it is not already obvious that one cannot consistently affirm (la) and
deny (2a), I think it can be made obvious by considering the kind of
thing that would show (2a) to be false. For example, if Charles, familiar
with the particular thermometer in question, should say, "Oh, I know

that thermometer; it is fairly accurate for temperatures below 98 but it

sticks at 98.6 for almost any higher temperature," we have been given
solid grounds for rejecting (2a). Simultaneously, however, we have been
given solid grounds for rejecting (la). If it is that kind of thermometer,
then if S's only basis for thinking his child's temperature normal is a 98.6
reading on it, then he does not know that his child's temperature is
normal. It might be normal, of course, but if S knows that it is, he must
have more to go on than the reading on this (defective) thermometer.
Other attempts to show (2a) to be false have the same effect; they
immediately undermine R (the reading on the thermometer) as an
adequate basis for someone's knowing that the child's temperature is
normal (P). For in rejecting (2a) we reject the thermometer as a reliable
device for discovering whether a person's temperature is normal, and
knowledge is not acquired by relying on what is unreliable in precisely
those respects in which we rely on it.
We frequently purport to know things on the basis of testimony.
James has a large stamp collection and, after giving a detailed description
of it, invites S to his home to see it. S declines, but he later refers to
James's stamp collection in conversation. It is easy enough to imagine
circumstances in which it would be natural for someone to ask S how
he knew, what reasons he had for thinking that James had such a
collection. And it is just as easy to imagine S, in response to such a
query, referring to his conversation with James. Let us assume, then, that
(lb) S knows that James has a stamp collection, and he knows this on the basis
of James's description (and invitation)
is true. I am not now concerned to argue that one can know something
of this sort in this way; the question is, rather, whether (2b) must be
true if (lb) is true.
(2b) James would not have said he had a stamp collection, described it in such
detail, and issued an invitation unless he had a stamp collection.
If James is the sort of fellow about which (2b) cannot be truly asserted,
then he is not the sort of fellow who can be trusted on such matters as
this. If James is the sort of fellow who sometimes says such things as a
joke, who would (or might) concoct such elaborate stories for his own
amusement (or whatever), who would (or might) whimsically issue an
invitation of this sort under totally false pretexts, then, despite the fact
that he is (by hypothesis) telling the truth on this occasion, his testimony
is hardly the sort on which one can rest a claim to know. In denying

(2b) one is conceding that James would, or might, have said what he
did without possessing a stamp collection, and in the light of this concession one cannot go on to insist that, nonetheless, S knows he has a
stamp collection on the basis, simply, of what James said.
Gilbert Harman contrasts two cases, the lottery case and the testimony
case.2 Although S, say, has only one among thousands of tickets in a
lottery and, hence, has an extremely slender chance of winning, we
naturally reject the idea that S could know that he was going to lose on
the basis of a correct probability estimate (well over 99.9%) of his
losing. Even if S correctly predicts that he is going to lose, we would
deny that he knew he was going to lose if the only basis he had for this
belief was the fact that his chances of winning were so slight.3 Harman
compares this case with the situation in which we often seem prepared
to say that S knows that P when he is told that P is the case by some
other person (testimony case). Although probability estimates are not
altogether appropriate here, we do know that people sometimes lie,
sometimes they are honestly mistaken, and so on. There always seems
to be a chance that what a person tells us is not the case, however
sincere or credible he may appear, and the order of magnitude of this
chance seems to be comparable to the chance that we might win in
some appropriate lottery situation. Why, then, are we prepared to say
that we know in the one case but not in the other? Harman has some
revealing remarks to make about these cases, but I mention them only
to bring out their relevance to the present discussion. For I think this
contrast strengthens the view that (2) is normally accepted as a necessary consequence of (1), that when we are unwilling to endorse the
corresponding instantiation of (2) we are unwilling to talk of anyone
knowing that P is the case on the basis of the evidence expressed by R.
In many testimony situations we are, I believe, willing to affirm (2): the
person would not have said it unless it was so. In the lottery case,
however, the connection between R and P expressed by this subjunc-

2
3

"Knowledge, Inference, and Explanation," in American Philosophical Quarterly, July 1968.

Of course S may have said "I know I am going to lose" and he may say now, after he has
lost, "I knew I was going to lose," but these expressions are normally accepted without
epistemological quibbling because they are taken as little more than expressions of resignation or despair. With this use of the verb "to know," one can know one is going to lose
and still spend a dollar for a ticket and a chance at the prizea fact about human beings that
is puzzling if they believe they know (in any epistemologically relevant sense) that they are
going to lose.

tive conditional fails to be realized, and it fails no matter how great the
probabilities become. Adjusting the wording of (2) to suit the example
in question4 we have
(2c) If S were going to win the lottery, his chances of winning would not be
1/m (m being the number of tickets sold).
Whatever (finite) value we give to m, we know this is false since
someone whose chances of winning are 1/m will win, and since there is
nothing special about S that would require him to have a better chance
of winning than anyone else in order to win, we reject (2c) as false.
Hence, we reject the idea that S can know he is going to lose on the
basis of the fact that his chances of losing are (m l)/m.
Alvin Goldman, in developing a causal account of knowledge, constructs a situation in which S is said to know that a nearby mountain (I
will call it M) erupted many years ago. He knows this on the basis of
the presence of solidified lava throughout the countryside surrounding
the mountain.5 According to Goldman, a necessary condition for S's
knowing that M erupted many years ago on the basis of the present
existence and distribution of the lava is that there be a causal connection
between the eruption of the mountain and the present existence and
distribution of the lava. I do not wish to dispute this claim at the
moment since the view I am advancing is even stronger: viz. that a
necessary condition for S to know that M erupted on this basis is that

The wording of (2) will sometimes have to be adjusted to suit the particular instantiation
in question. The chief factors determining this adjustment are the relative temporal locations of R, P, and the time of utterance and also the causal connections, if any, that are
believed to hold between R and P. The particular wording I have given (2) is most
appropriate when P is some state of affairs antecedent to (or contemporaneous with) both
R and the time of utterance. This, of course, is the result of the fact that (2) is most often
used when P is some state of affairs causally responsible for the present condition R. When
P is a future state we might express (2) as: R would not be the case unless P were going to
happen. For example, he would not have registered unless he were going to vote. I do not
wish to preclude the possibility of knowing that something will occur on the basis of
present evidence by restricting the wording of (2). The difficulty, of course, is that when P
is some future state, the subjunctive relating it to R generally becomes somewhat questionable. We prefer to say, in our more cautious moods, that if he were not planning to vote,
he would not have registered (acknowledging, thereby, the fact that contingencies may
interfere with the execution of his plans). But in the same cautious moods we prefer to say,
not that we know he is going to vote (because he registered), but that we know he plans
or intends to vote.
"A Causal Theory of Knowing, "Journal of Philosophy, June 22, 1967, p. 361.

(2d) The lava would not be here, and distributed in this manner, unless M
erupted
is true. (2d) is a stronger claim than that the eruption of M is causally
connected with the present existence and distribution of the lava. (2d)
requires, in addition, that M's eruption be necessary for the present state
of affairs. To illustrate, consider the following embellishment on Goldman's example. Not far from M is another mountain, N. The geology
of the area is such that at the point in time at which M erupted
something, so to speak, was bound to give; if M had not erupted, N
would have. Furthermore, the location of N is such that if it, rather than
M, had erupted, the present distribution of lava would have been, in all
respects relevant to S's taking it as a reason for believing M erupted, the
same. In such circumstances Goldman's necessary condition is satisfied,
but mine is not. (2d) is false; it is false that the lava would not be here,
and distributed in this fashion, unless M had erupted. For if, contrary to
the hypothesis, M had not erupted, N would have, leaving the very
same (relevant) traces.
In such circumstances I do not think we could say that S knew that
M erupted on the basis of the present existence and distribution of lava.
For, by hypothesis, this state of affairs would have obtained whether M
erupted or not and, hence, there is nothing about this state of affairs that
favors one hypothesis (M erupted) over a competing hypothesis (N
erupted). S is still correct in supposing that M did erupt, still correct in
supposing that it was M's eruption that is causally responsible for the
present existence and distribution of lava, but he does not know it was
M that erupted not unless he has some additional grounds that preclude N. If he has such additional grounds, call them Q, then we can
say that he knows that M erupted and he knows this on the basis of R
and Q. In this case, however, the corresponding instantiation of (2) is
also satisfied: R and Q would not be the case unless M erupted. As
things stand, the most that S could know, on the basis simply of the
present existence and distribution of lava, is that either M or N erupted.
(2) permits us to say this much, and no more, about what can be known
on the basis of lava flow.
The case becomes even clearer if we exploit another of Harman's
examples.6 Harold has a ticket in a lottery. The odds against his winning

In "Knowledge, Inference, and Explanation," pp. 168-169. I have adapted the example
somewhat.

are 10,000 to 1. The prize, call it an X, is something that Harold does

not now have nor could he reasonably expect to obtain one by means
other than winning the lottery. Enter a philanthropic gentleman, Rockaford, who decides to give Harold an X if (as seems likely) he should
fail to win one in the lottery. Things go as one would expect; Harold
holds a losing ticket. Rockaford keeps his word and gives Harold an X.
S, familiar with the preceding circumstances but unaware of whether
Harold won or lost in the lottery, finds Harold with his newly acquired
X. S infers that Harold received his X from Rockaford. He concludes
this because he knows that the only other way Harold might have
acquired an X is by winning the lottery and the odds against that
happening are enormous. The following conditions are satisfied: (a)
Harold received his X from Rockaford; (b) S believes that Harold
received his X from Rockaford; (c) S is warranted in believing this since
the chances of his having received it in any other way are negligible; (d)
Rockaford's generous gift of an X to Harold is the (causal?) explanation
of Harold's present possession of an X; and, finally (e) S correctly
reconstructs (to use Goldman's language) the causal chain of events that
brought about Harold's possession of an X. Yet, why does it seem clear
(at least to myself and apparently to Harman) that S does not know
that Rockaford gave Harold his X. Because
(2e) Harold would not have an X unless Rockaford gave him one
is plainly false.7 If Rockaford had not given him an X, it would have
been because Harold already possessed one as a winner in the lottery.
Hence, Harold would possess an X even if Rockaford had not given
him one. It is not true that R would not be the case unless P; hence, not
true that S knows that P on the basis of R. 8
(2), therefore, expresses something stronger than a causal relationship be-

There is a way of reading (2e) that makes it sound true viz., if we illicitly smuggle in the
fact that Harold has lost the lottery. That is, (2e') "Harold, having lost the lottery, would
not have an X unless Rockaford had given him one" is true. But this version of (2) makes
R, the reason S has for believing Rockaford gave him an X, not only Harold's possession
of an X but also his having lost the lottery. This, by hypothesis, is not part of S's reason;
hence, not properly included in (2e). (2e) must be read in something like the following
fashion: Harold would not have an X, whatever the outcome of the lottery, unless
Rockaford had given him one. With this reading it is clearly false.
It is difficult to say whether this is a counterexample to Goldman's analysis. I think it
satisfies all the conditions he catalogs as sufficient for knowledge, but this depends on how
strictly Goldman intends the condition that S must be warranted in inferring that P is the
case from R.

tween R and P. It should be pointed out, however, that it expresses

something that is, in certain important respects, weaker than a universal
association between states or conditions similar to R and states or conditions similar to P. When " R " and " P " are expressions that stand for
particular conditions or states of affairs, as will often be the case when we
know one thing on the basis of something else, (2) expresses a connection between more determinate states of affairs than those described by
talking about states similar to R and P. If someone remarks, midway
through a poker hand, that if his neighbor had not folded (dropped from
the game) he (the speaker) would have been dealt a royal flush, he is obviously not maintaining that whenever his neighbor remains in the game,
he (the speaker) is rewarded with a royal flush. Rather, he is talking
about this hand (already holding four cards to the royal flush), this particular distribution of cards in the remainder of the deck, this particular seating arrangement, and so on. He is not saying that his neighbor's remaining in the game is, quite generally, sufficient for his receipt of a royal
flush. Rather, he is saying that in the particular circumstances which in fact pre-

vailed on this occasion, circumstances that include such things as card distribution, arrangement of players, and so on, an occurrence of the first
sort (neighbor remains in game) will invariably be followed by one of
the second sort (his receipt of a royal flush). One cannot falsify his claim
by showing that he would not have received a royal flush, despite his
neighbor's remaining in the game, if the card distribution in the deck
had been different from what it in fact was. For his claim was a claim
about the inevitable sequence of events with that distribution of cards.
Statements such as (2), then, even when R and P are expressions for
particular states of affairs, express a general uniformity, but this general
uniformity is not that whenever a state similar to R is the case, then a
state similar to P will also be (or have been) the case. The uniformity in
question concerns the relationship between states similar to R and P
under a fixed set of circumstances. Whenever (a state such as) R in circum-

stances C then (a state such as) P where the circumstances C are defined
in terms of those circumstances that actually prevail on the occasion of
R and P. But does C include all the circumstances that prevail on the
occasion in question or only some of these? Clearly not all the circumstances since this would trivialize every subjunctive conditional of this
sort. Even if we restrict C to only those circumstances logically independent of R and P we still obtain a trivialization. For, to use Goldman's
mountain example (as embellished), C would still include the fact that
N did not erupt (since this is logically independent of both R and P),

10

and this is obviously one of the circumstances not held fixed when we
say that the lava would not be here unless M erupted. For in asserting
his subjunctive we mean to be asserting something that would be false
in the situation described (N would have erupted if M had not), whereas
if we hold this circumstance (N did not erupt) fixed, the uniformity
between the presence of lava and M's eruption would hold.
I think that our examples, not to mention an extensive literature on
the subject,9 point the way to a proper interpretation of C. The circumstances that are assumed constant, that are tacitly held fixed, in conditionals such as (2), are those circumstances prevailing on the occasion in
question (the occasion on and between which the particular states R
and P obtain) that are logically and causally independent of the state of
affairs expressed by P. 10 When we have a statement in the subjunctive
that (unlike (2)) is counterfactual (the antecedent gives expression to a
state of affairs that does or did not obtain), then C includes those
circumstances prevailing on the occasion that are logically and causally
independent of the state of affairs (or lack of such state) expressed by the
antecedent of the conditional. In our poker game, for example, we can
say that S's statement (I would have got a royal flush if my neighbor had
stayed in the game) fixes that set of circumstances that are logically and
causally independent of his neighbor's staying in the game (i.e., the
antecedent since the statement is counterfactual). Hence, if there is
another player in the game (whose presence or absence affects the cards
dealt to S) who would have dropped out if S's neighbor had not dropped
9

I am not proposing a solution to the problem to which Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction
and Forecast, Chapter I), Roderick Chisholm ("The Contrary-to-Fact Conditional," Mind,
55, 1946), and others addressed themselves in trying to specify the "relevant conditions"
associated with counterfactuals. I shall use the notion of "causality" in my treatment, a
device that both Goodman and Chisholm would regard as question-begging. I am not,
however, attempting to offer an extensionalist analysis of the subjunctive conditional; I
am merely trying to get clear in what way such conditionals are stronger than the
statement of a causal relationship between R and P and yet (in one sense) weaker than a
statement of the universal association between states similar to R and P.
10 This characterization of the circumstances " C " has interesting and, I believe, significant
repercussions for subjunctives having the form of (2) in which R expresses some present
(or past) state of affairs and P expresses some future state of affairs. Although I lack the
space to discuss the point here, I believe an important asymmetry is generated by a shift
in the relative temporal locations of R and P. I also believe, however, that this asymmetry
is faithfully reflected in the difference between knowing what will happen on the basis of
present data and knowing what did happen on the basis of present data. In other words, I
feel that an asymmetry in (2), arising from a shift in the relative temporal locations of R
and P, helps one to understand the difference we all feel between knowing, on the one
hand, what did happen or is happening and, on the other hand, what will happen.

11

out, then this person's remaining in the game is not held fixed, not
included in C, because it is causally connected to the state of affairs
expressed by the antecedent in S's statement. Therefore, we can show
S's statement to be false if we can show that such a circumstance
prevailed, and it is along these lines that one would surely argue in
attempting to show S that he was wrong, wrong in saying that he would
have received a royal flush if his neighbor had stayed in the game.
On the other hand, one cannot show that S's statement is false by
showing that, were the cards differently arranged in the remainder of
the deck, he would not have received his royal flush; for the arrangement of cards in the remainder of the deck (unlike the presence or
absence of our other player) is (presumably) independent of S's neighbor's departure from the game. Hence, it is one of the conditions held
fixed, included in C, by S's statement, and we are not allowed to
consider alterations in it in assessing the general implication of S's statement.
Or consider our original thermometer example. Recall, the statement
in question was: "The thermometer would not have read 98.6 unless
the child's temperature was normal." Suppose someone responds, "Oh,
it would have (or might have) if the thermometer was broken." It is
important to understand that one can grant the truth of this response
without abandoning the original assertion; for the original assertion had,
as its general implication, not a statement expressing a uniform relationship between states of affairs similar to the child's temperature (normal
body temperature) and states of affairs similar to the thermometer reading (a reading of 98.6), but, rather, a uniformity between such states
under a fixed set of circumstances. And, if I am right, this fixed set of
circumstances includes the actual state of the thermometer (defective or
accurate); it is one of those circumstances prevailing on the occasion in
question that is causally and logically independent of the child's temperature. Hence, this circumstance cannot be allowed to vary as it is in the
preceding response by the words "if the thermometer was broken." To
determine the truth of the original assertion, we must suppose that the
thermometer is accurate (or defective) whatever the actual condition is. If,
therefore, the thermometer was not broken or otherwise defective on
that occasion, then the suggestion that it would (or might) have read the
same despite a feverish child if it were broken or defective is, although
quite true, irrelevant to the truth of the statement: "It would not have
read 98.6 unless the child's temperature was normal."
One final important feature of (2). I have said that, generally speaking,

12

the placeholders " R " and " P " represent expressions designating specific
states of affairs or conditions. When this is so, (2) still has a general
implication, but the general implication, expressing a uniform relationship between states of affairs similar to R and P, has its scope restricted to
situations in which the circumstances C (as specified earlier) obtain.
Since we are talking about specific states of affairs in most instantiations
of (2), it becomes extremely important to observe the sorts of referring
expressions embodied within both " R " and "P." For example, when I
say, "John would not have said it was raining unless it was raining," I
am talking about John and about a particular utterance of his. Someone else
might have said this without its being true; John may have said something
else without its being true. Nonetheless, John would not have said it was
raining unless it was. An incurable liar about most things, John has a
pathological devotion to accuracy on matters concerning the weather.
In such a case, although John is, admittedly, a most unreliable informant
on most matters, we can say that he would not have said it was raining
unless it was so. This is only to say that the referring expressions to be
found in " R " and " P " help to define the scope of the implied generalization. Recall, the implied generalization was about states of affairs similar
to (the particular states) R and P. Similar in what respect? The sorts of
referring expressions to be found within " R " and " P " help us to answer
this question. In the case of John, the general implication involved not
a person's saying something (under circumstances C), not John's saying
something (under circumstances C), but John's saying something about
the weather (under circumstances C).

2. THE POSSIBILITY OF MISTAKE: THE CONNECTION

BETWEEN (2) AND (3).
Taking a cue from the fact that (2) expresses some form of necessary
relationship between R and P, I have (in my opening remarks) expressed
(2) as: Given R, ~ <) ~ P (or, alternatively, ~ <)(R. ~ P)). I think the
full justification for expressing (2) in this fashion lies in the fact that (2)
and (3) are contradictories, and since (3) may be rendered as
(3) Given R, () ~ P (or, alternatively, <)(R. ~ P)
(2) may be represented as "Given R, ~ () ~ P."
To see that this is so, it should be noticed that in denying the
connection between R and P expressed by (2) we do not commit
ourselves to anything as strong as

13

(4) R would be the case even though not-P were the case.
(4) is the contrary of (2), not its contradictory, since both (2) and (4) may
turn out false.11 For example, suppose S asserts,
(2g) I would have won the lottery if I had bought two tickets (instead of only
one).
We may deny the truth of this contention without committing ourselves
to the truth of
(4g) You would have lost even if you had bought two tickets.
All that is intended in denying (2g) is that the purchase of two tickets is
connected with winning in the alleged manner, that the purchase of two
tickets would have assured him of winning. Its failing to be connected
in the manner alleged is, however, quite consistent with his winning with
two tickets. What we commit ourselves to in denying (2g) is
(3g) You might have lost even with two tickets.
(3g) asserts what (2g) denies; viz. that even with two tickets it is still a
matter of chance; the possibility of losing is not eliminated by holding
two tickets instead of one.
As a matter of common practice, of course, we often employ something similar to (4) in denying (2). This is understandable enough since
the truth of (4) does entail the falsity of (2). The point I am driving at,
however, is that we need not affirm anything as strong as (4) in denying
(2); all we are required to affirm is that R and not-P might both be the
case or that, even though R is given, P might not be the case. That is to
say, the proper expression for the negation of (2) is (3); and if we
understand (3) as affirming "Given R, () ~ P" (alternatively ()(R. ~
P)), then we are justified in representing (2) as "Given R, ~ () ~ P"
(alternatively, ~ ()(R. ~ P))- If someone says, "James would not have
come without an invitation," we can deny this without supposing that
James would have come without an invitation. For suppose we know
that if James had not received an invitation, he would have flipped a
coin to decide whether to go or not. In such a case, it is not true that
he would not have come without an invitation, but neither is it true

11 A point that Goodman acknowledges in a footnote: "Literally a semifactual and the

corresponding counterfactual are not contradictories but contraries, and both may be
false." Fact, Fiction and Forecast, p. 32, note 2.

14

that he would have come without an invitation. The fact is that he might
have come (depending on the outcome of the toss) without an invitation.
Before proceeding there is an important ambiguity that must be
eliminated. There is a use of the word "might" (and related modal
terms) that gives expression to the speaker's epistemic state in relation to
some situation. It is a use of the word "might" that is naturally followed
by a parenthetical "for all I know." For example, in saying, "He might
win the election," the speaker is most naturally understood as expressing
the fact that he does not know whether he will win the election or not,
that he has no (or there are no) very convincing grounds for supposing
he will lose. This use of the word can properly be deployed even when
the state of affairs in question is physically or logically impossible. S, for
instance, may concede the premises of our valid argument but, nonetheless, ignorant of its validity, insist that the conclusion might (for all he
knows) be false even though the premises are true.
Contrasted with this epistemic use of the modal terms is what we
might call an objective sense of these terms, a sense of the term "could"
(for example) in which if R entails P then, independent of what S
knows about the logical relationship between R and P, it is false to say
that R and not-P could (or might) both be the case. Moreover, if we
accept the results of modern physics, then in this objective sense of the
term S's statement that there are objects that can travel faster than the
speed of light is false, and it is false even though, for all he knows, there
are objects that can. In this objective sense one is making a remark about
the various possibilities for the occurrence, or joint occurrence, of events
or the coexistence of states of affairs, and in this sense ignorance of what
is the case is no guarantee that one's statements about what might or
could be the case are true. The possibilities must actually be as one alleges.
When S (knowing that James had an invitation to come) asserts that
James, being the sort of fellow he is, might (even) have come without
an invitation, he is making a remark about James and what James is
inclined to do or capable of doing. He is obviously not registering some
fact about his ignorance of whether or not James possesses an invitation.
The modal term appearing in (3) is meant to be understood in the
objective sense. (3) is meant to be a statement about the possibilities for
the joint realization of two states of affairs (R and not-P) independent
of what the speaker happens to know about the actual realization of P
(R being given). Drawing from our discussion in the preceding section,
we can say that if (2) is true, if R would not be the case unless P were
the case, then in these circumstances (specified earlier) P is a state of affairs

15

that is necessary to the realization of R. Hence, in these circumstances

it is false to say that R and not-P might both be the case or that, given
R, not-P might be the case, and it is false whether or not anyone
appreciates the fact that it is false.
We have here a more or less particularized impossibility; (3), as well as
(2), is tied to the circumstances, C, specified earlier. Nothing else but (a
state such as) P could have brought about (a state such as) R in these
circumstances. Often, of course, our statements about what could be the
case, about what is possible, are broader in scope. They do not restrict
themselves to the particular set of circumstances prevailing on some
specific occasion. They are statements to the effect that, whatever the
circumstances on this occasion happened to be, there are (nonetheless)
circumstances in which a state relevantly similar to R is, or might easily
be, brought about without a state relevantly similar to P. S may admit,
for example, that the thermometer would not have read 98.6 unless the
child's temperature was normal hence, concede that it would be false
to say that in these circumstances (given the thermometer reading) the
child might (nonetheless) have a fever. Yet, he may go on to insist that
one can get a normal reading on a thermometer with a feverish child.
One can do so when one has a defective thermometer, when the child
is sucking an ice cube, and so on. That is, one can have R without P in
other circumstances. These "general" possibilities are, however, quite
consistent with the "particularized" impossibilities expressed by (3).
Most genuine impossibilities can be made possible by enlarging the
frame of reference, by relaxing the conditions tacitly taken as fixed in
the original statement of impossibility. I can't swim the English Channel;
this despite the fact that I could if I had trained since a boy, been
endowed with the requisite endurance, and so on.
If I may summarize the argument up to this point in preparation for
the following section: (1) entails (2), if S knows that P, and he knows
this on the basis (simply) of R, then R would not be the case unless P
were the case. Furthermore, (2) gives expression to a connection between R and P that permits us to say that when R is given, in the kinds
of circumstances that actually prevailed on the occasion in question, the
possibility of not-P is eliminated. The sense of the word "possible" that
is operative here is, I submit, the same sense of this word that is operating
in our strongest statements about what is physically possible; the difference between the possibility expressed in (3) and other, apparently
stronger, statements of what is possible and impossible is simply a shift
in the set of circumstances that is taken as fixed. The impossibility

16

expressed by (3) is an impossibility relative to those circumstances, C,

held fixed in (2), and it is this fact that makes (3) the contradictory of
(2) and, hence, that makes its negation a logical consequence of (1).
3. CONCLUSIVE REASONS

Let us call R a conclusive reason for P if and only if R would not be

the case unless P were the case.12 This makes logically conclusive reasons
(LCR) a subclass of conclusive reasons. Conclusive reasons depend,
simply, on the truth of (2); LCR require that the truth of (2) be
demonstrable on purely logical and definitional grounds. When the
conditional is true, but not logically true, we can speak of the conclusive
reasons as being empirically conclusive (ECR).
Of course, R may be a conclusive reason for believing P without
anyone believing P, much less having R as his reason for believing. I
shall say, therefore, that S has conclusive reasons, R, for believing P if and
only if:
(A) R is a conclusive reason for P (i.e., (2) is true),
(B) S believes, without doubt, reservation, or question, that P is the case and
he believes this on the basis of R,
(C) (i) S knows that R is the case or
(ii) R is some experiential state of S (about which it may not make sense
to suppose that S knows that R is the case; at least it no longer makes
much sense to ask how he knows).
With only minor embellishments, to be mentioned in a moment, I
believe that S's having conclusive reasons for believing P is both a
necessary and a sufficient condition for his knowing that P is the case.
The appearance of the word "know" in this characterization (in (Ci))
does not render it circular as a characterization of knowledge since it
can be eliminated by a recursive application of the three conditions until
(Cii) is reached.
If S has conclusive reasons for believing P, then it is false to say that,
given these grounds for belief, and the circumstances in which these
grounds served as the basis for his belief, 5 might be mistaken about P.
Having conclusive reasons, as I have just defined it, not only implies
that P is the case, it not only implies that S believes that P is the case,

12

Recall footnote 5 concerning the particular wording of (2); I intend those remarks to
apply to this definition of "conclusive reasons."

17

but it also implies that, in the circumstances in which he came to believe

that P, his basis for believing that P was sufficiently secure to eliminate
the possibility of his being mistaken about P. This goes a long way
toward capturing everything that philosophers have traditionally required of knowledge. Indeed, in certain respects it goes beyond it in
requiring a stronger connecton between one's reasons or grounds and
what one believes (on the basis of these reasons or grounds) than has
normally been demanded by those wishing to preserve our ordinary
knowledge claims from skeptical criticism.13 Since, however, I have
already argued for the necessity of (A), for R's being a conclusive reason
for P, I shall concentrate on the question of whether or not S's having a
conclusive reason for believing P is sufficient for his knowing that P.
Several preliminary points must be mentioned briefly. It may be
thought that in arguing for the impossibility of mistake as a necessary
condition for knowing that P, I have been wasting my time. It may be
thought that if S knows that P, then P cannot be false since S's knowing
that P entails P; hence, S cannot be mistaken in believing that P. In
answer to this objection it should be pointed out that the impossibility
of mistake that I have been talking about is an impossibility that arises in
virtue of a special connection between S's reasons, R, and what he consequently believes, P. It is not the trivial impossibility of being wrong
about something that (by hypothesis) you know. When philosophers

13 It is this stronger connection that blocks the sort of counterexample that can be generated
to justified-true-belief analyses of knowledge. Gettier's (and Lehrer's) examples, for instance, are directed at those analyses that construe knowledge in terms of a degree of
justification that is compatible with being justified in believing something false (both
Gettier and Lehrer mention this feature at the beginning of their discussion). The counterexamples are then constructed by allowing S to believe that P (which is false) with the
appropriate degree of justification, letting P entail Q (which is true), and letting S believe that
Q on the basis of its logical relationship to P. We have, then, a case where S truly believes
that Q with the appropriate degree of justification (this degree of justification is allegedly
preserved through the entailment between P and Q), but a case where S does not know
that Q (since his means of arriving as it were so clearly defective). On the present analysis,
of course, the required connection between S's evidence and P is strong enough to
preclude P's being false. One cannot have conclusive reasons for believing something that is
false. Hence, this sort of counter-example cannot be generated. Part of the motivation for
the present analysis is the conviction (supported by Gettier-like examples) that knowledge,
if it embodies an evidential relation at all, must embody a strong enough one to eliminate
the possibility of mistake. See Edmund Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"
Analysis, 23.6, June 1963, and Keith Lehrer, "Knowledge, Truth and Evidence," Analysis,
25.5, April 1965. I should also mention here that these same sorts of considerations
seemed to move Brian Skyrms toward a similar analysis; see especially pp. 385386 in his
"The Explication of'X knows That P'," The Journal of Philosophy, June 22, 1967.

18

concern themselves with the possibility of mistake in putative cases of

knowledge, they are not concerned with the possibility of mistake that
is trivially avoidable by saying that if you do know that P, then you
cannot be mistaken about P. They are concerned, rather, with that
possibility as it exists in relation to one's evidence or grounds for believing P, and that is the possibility with which (2) is concerned.
The point may be put in another way. Both
I. R would not be the case unless P were the case
R is the case
and
II. R D P (when it is not true that R would not be the case unless P)
R
constitute conclusive grounds, logically conclusive grounds, for believing
P. Neither set of premises would be true unless P were true, and this
fact is in both cases demonstrable on purely logical and definitional
grounds. But the significant difference between I and II is that in I, but
not in II, the second premise alone turns out to be a conclusive reason
(ECR). If we were searching for conclusive reasons to believe P, then
in the second case we would require as our reasons both premises, and
this would require that we knew that both premises were true (see
clause (C) in having conclusive reasons). In case I, however, the second
premise alone is a conclusive reason and, hence, to have conclusive
reasons it is required only that we know that R is the case. We need not (as
in case II) know that the first premise is true. All that is required in case
I for R alone to be a conclusive reason is that the first premise be true;
there is nothing that requires S to know that the first premise is true in
order to have R as his conclusive reason for believing P. For if the first
premise is true (regardless of whether S knows it is true or not), then (3)
is false; hence, the possibility of S's being mistaken about P has been
successfully avoided - and it has been successfully avoided whether or not
S knows it has been avoided.

In speaking of conclusive reasons I do not wish to suggest that in

having R as a conclusive reason S must be in a position to give R as his
reason. R may simply be a certain experience that S has undergone and,
having undergone this experience, come to the belief that P was the
case on the basis of (as a result of) this experience. He may find it
difficult, or impossible, to give verbal expression to R. He may have
forgotten R. Or R may consist in something's looking a particular way

19

to him that he finds difficult to describe. Still, if the way the thing looks
to S is such that it would not look that way unless it had the property
Q, then its looking that way to S is a conclusive reason for S's believing
that it has the property Q; and if S believes that it is Q on this basis, then
he has, in the way the thing looks to him, a conclusive reason for
believing it Q.
Also, there are a number of things that people commonly profess to
know (Sacramento is the capital of California, the earth is roughly
spherical) for which there is no definite piece of evidence, no single state
of affairs or easily specifiable set of such states, that even approximates a
conclusive reason. In such cases, although we can cite no single piece of
data that is clinching and, hence, are at a loss for conclusive reasons
when asked to give reasons (or when asked "How do you know?") we,
nonetheless, often enough have conclusive reasons in a vast spectrum of
experiences that are too diverse to admit of convenient citation. Countless experiences converge, so to speak, on the truth of a given proposition, and this variety of experience may be such that although one may
have had any one of these experiences without the proposition in question being true, one would not have had all of them unless what one
consequently believes was true. The fallibility of source A and the
fallibility of source B does not automatically entail that when A and B
agree about P's being the case, that, nonetheless, P might still be false.
For it may be that A and B would not both have indicated that P was the
case unless P was the case, although neither A nor B, taken by themselves, provide conclusive reasons for P. For example, although any
single newspaper account may be in error on a particular point, several
independent versions (wire services, of course, tend to eliminate this
independence) may be enough to say that we know that something is
so on the basis of the newspaper accounts. All of them would not have been
in such close agreement unless their account was substantially correct.14
Finally, I do not wish to suggest by my use of the word "reason" that

14 The fact that all newspapers sometimes print things that are false does not mean that we
cannot know that something is true on the basis of a single newspaper account. The
relevant question to ask (as in the case of a person's testimony - see Section 1) is not
whether newspapers sometimes print false stories, not even whether this newspaper sometimes prints false stories, but whether this newspaper would have printed this story if it were
not true. The Midville Weekly Gazette's story about dope addiction on the campus may
not correspond with the facts, but would The Times have printed this story about the
president's visit to Moscow if it were not true?

20

when S has conclusive reasons for believing P, S has reasoned his way to
the conclusion that P is the case from premises involving R or that S
has consciously used R a s a reason in arriving at the belief that P. I am
inclined to think (but I shall not now argue it) that when one knows
that P, on whatever basis this might be, little or no reasoning is involved.
I would prefer to describe it as follows: sometimes a person's conviction
that P is the case can be traced to a state of affairs (or cluster of situations)
that satisfies the three conditions defining the possession of conclusive
reasons. When it can be so traced, then he knows; when it cannot be so
traced, then we say he does not know, although he may be right about
P's being the case. Of course, his belief may be traceable to such a source
without our being able to trace it. In such a case we are mistaken in
saying that he does not know.
Turning now to the question of whether having conclusive reasons
to believe, as defined by (A)-(C), constitutes a sufficient condition for
knowledge, I shall mention and briefly respond to what I consider to be
the most serious objections to this proposal.
There is, first, a tendency to conflate knowing that P with knowing
that one knows that P. If this is done then conditions (A)(C) will
immediately appear insufficient since they do not describe S as knowing
or having any basis for believing that R, his basis for believing P,
constitutes an adequate basis, much less a conclusive basis, for believing
P. Even if one does not go this far, there is still a tendency to say that if
S knows that P, then S must at least believe that he knows that P is the
case. If one adopts this view then, once again, conditions (A)(C) appear
inadequate since they do not describe (nor do they entail) that S believes
he knows that P is the case. I see no reason, however, to accept either
of these claims. We naturally expect of one who knows that P that he
believe that he knows, just as we expect of someone who is riding a
bicycle that he believe he is riding one, but in neither case is the belief
a necessary accompaniment. The confusion is partially fostered, I believe,
by a failure to distinguish between what is implied in knowing that P
and what is implied (in some sense) by someone's saying he knows that
P. Consider, however, cases in which we freely ascribe knowledge to
agents in which it seems quite implausible to assign the level of conceptual sophistication requisite to their believing something about knowledge, believing something about their epistemic relation to the state of
affairs in question. A dog may know that his master is in the room, and
I (at least) want to say that he can know this in a straightforward sense

21

without (necessarily) possessing the conceptual understanding that seems

to be required to say of him that he believes he knows this, believes that
he has good reasons, or believes anything about his epistemic relation to
the fact that his master is in the room.15 Yet, it seems perfectly natural
to say of a dog that he knows (sometimes) when his master is in the
room. And this is not, let me add, simply a matter of the dog's being
right about something. For if we knew that the dog thought his master
was in the room on the basis, say, of certain sounds and smells (sounds
and smells that were, generally speaking, a reliable sign of his master)
when these sounds and smells were totally unrelated to his master's
presence in the room on this occasion, we would not say the dog knew
even if he happened to be right about his master's being in the room.
Imagine a blind dog's being "taken in" by a thief in his master's clothing
while the master lies unconscious in the corner. The dog, taken in as he
is by the thief, certainly thinks his master is in the room, and he is right
(although, of course, he is wrong about this man's being his master). But
just as clearly, the dog does not know that his master is in the room.
We require conclusive reasons even in the case of animals. Would the
dog have smelled what he did, and heard what he did, if his master was
not in the room? If he would have, or might have, then he doesn't know.16
15 This seems to be the essence of Arthur Danto's argument (against Hintikka) that "S knows
that P" does not entail "S knows that S knows that P" in "On Knowing that We Know,"
Epistemology: New Essays in the Theory of Knowledge, Avrum Stroll (ed.), 1967, pp. 49-51.
16 Robert Sleigh has suggested an interesting modification of this case - one that would
appear to cause difficulty. Suppose that the dog is taken in by the thief but, in addition,
circumstances are such that the thief would not be in the room unless the dog's master was
also there. It may be a bit difficult to imagine circumstances of this sort, but other
examples (not involving animals as the knowers) can easily be manufactured (Chisholm's
example of a man mistaking a sheep dog for a sheep in a field works nicely when the
further condition is added that the dog would not be there unless there were some sheep
in the field). With such a modification it would seem that the dog has conclusive reasons
for believing his master present since it would not have heard and smelled what it did
unless his master was present. But does the dog know that his master is present? I think it
natural to read this situation in such a way that the dog believes that his master is in the
room because he mistakenly believes that this man (the thief) is his master. If read in this
way, of course, there is no difficulty since the dog's basis for believing that his master is
present is obviously defective it is not true, nor does the dog know, that this man is his
master. If, however, we read this case in such a way that the dog simply takes the sounds
and smells as a sign of his master's presence (without misidentifying anyone), then the dog
does have conclusive reasons (he would not have smelled and heard what he did unless his
master was present), but I should want to say that in this case he knows that his master is
present. I do not think that this is an excessively strained interpretation. It seems to me
quite similar to situations in which we know that something is so on the basis of some
indicator or sign (e.g., an instrument reading) but are ignorant as to the mechanism in

22

Furthermore, consider a skeptic who talked himself into believing

that his grounds for believing in an external world were not sufficiently
good to truly say he knew there was an external world and, hence, no
longer believed, positively disbelieved, that he knew there was an external world. I think that as long as he continued to believe (without
doubt, reservation, or question) that there was an external world, and
continued to believe it on the same basis as we do, he would know
there was an external world (assuming here that we know it) whatever he
happened to believe about what he knew.17
The remarks I have just made about believing that one knows apply,
a fortiori, to knowing that one knows. One qualifies for knowledge
when one has conclusive reasons for believing; one need not, in addition, know that one has conclusive grounds. To know that one has
conclusive reasons, empirically conclusive reasons, means that one
knows that (A) is true and this, in turn, means that one has logically
conclusive reasons (see case I earlier). Knowing that one knows is a form
of inoculation against skeptical challenges to the quality of one's empirically conclusive reasons; one knows that R would not be the case unless
P were the case. Lacking such inoculation, however, one still knows.
One is simply less prepared to defend (justify) the claim to knowledge;
but inability to justify the truth of what one claims is seldom, if ever, a
refutation of the truth of what one claims, and this applies to knowledge
claims as well as to any other.
There is a certain type of counterexample that exploits this confusion,
and I would like to mention it at this point to further clarify the intent
of conditions (A)(C). Suppose S, for a perfectly silly reason, or by sheer
accident, comes to the true belief that (a state such as) R is a conclusive
reason for believing that (a state such as) P is or was the case. Happening
upon a state such as R in the appropriate circumstances, then, he believes
that P is the case on the basis of R. Doesn't he now have conclusive
reasons for believing P? But isn't it equally obvious that he does not know
that P is the case? Yes and no. Yes, he does have conclusive reasons (as
I have defined this). No, it is not obvious that he does not know that P
virtue of which that indicator or sign is a reliable (conclusive) index of what we purport to
know.
17 Examples such as this, along with other, more systematic considerations, convince me that
not only should we not require that S believe he has conclusive reasons in order to know,
but also that we should not require that he not believe he does not have conclusive
reasons. If a person's believing that he knows is compatible with his not knowing, why
shouldn't a person's believing that he does not know be compatible with his knowing?

23

is the case. I believe that this objection trades on the very confusion we
have just discussed; that is, it mistakenly supposes that if S does not
know that R is conclusive for P (has no legitimate basis for believing
this), then S does not know that P is the case (has no legitimate basis for
believing this). Or, what I think amounts to the very same thing, it
fallaciously concludes that S (given his basis for belief) might be wrong
about P from the fact that S (given his basis for belief) might be wrong
about R's being conclusive for P. Or, to put it in still another way, it
incorrectly supposes that if it is, either wholly or in part, accidental that
S is right about R's being conclusive for P, then it is also, either wholly
or in part, accidental that he is right about P's being the case. Such
inferences are fallacious and, I believe, they are fallacious in the same
way as the following two examples: (a) Concluding that it was sheer
luck (chance), a mere accident, that the declarer made his bid of seven
spades because it was sheer luck (chance), a mere accident, that he was
dealt thirteen spades; (b) Concluding that the window was broken
accidentally because the man who threw the brick through it came by
the belief that bricks break windows in an accidental (silly, unreasonable,
or what have you) way.
Sometimes the stage is set for a nonaccident in a purely accidental
way. In the preceding case it is accidental that S knows that P on the
basis of R, but this does not make it accidental that he is right about P
for he believes P on the basis of R, and R simply would not be the case
unless P were the case. Given R, it is not at all accidental that he is right
about P. What is accidental is that he was correct in believing that R
was a conclusive reason for P, but all this shows is that he does not
know that R is conclusive for P, does not know that he knows that P.
And with this much I am in full agreement.18
Skeptical arguments have traditionally relied on the fact that S in
purporting to know that P on the basis of R, was conspicuously unable
to justify the quality of his reasons, was hopelessly incapable of providing
satisfactory documentation for the truth of (A). The conclusion fallaciously drawn from this was that S did not know that P was true (simply)
18 In speaking of "accidentality" in this connection I have in mind Peter Unger's analysis of
knowledge in terms of its not being at all accidental that the person is right (see his "An
Analysis of Factual Knowledge," Journal of Philosophy, March 21, 1968). That is, I want to
claim that any S satisfying conditions (A)(C) is a person of whom it is true to say that it
is not at all accidental that he is right about P's being the case, although it may be
accidental that this is no accident (it may be accidental that he has conclusive reasons, that
he has reasons in virtue of which it is not at all accidental that he is right about P).

24

on the basis of R. Clearly, however, all that follows from the fact that S
has little or no grounds for thinking (A) true is that he lacks satisfactory
grounds for thinking he knows that P is true. It does not follow that he
does not know that P is true. Knowing that P is the case on the basis of
R involves knowing that R is the case (and believing P on that basis)
when (A) is true. It is the truth of (A), not the fact that one knows it true,
that makes R conclusive for P.
There is another respect in which traditional skeptical arguments have
been on the mark. One way of expressing my argument is to say that
the familiar and (to some) extremely annoying challenge, "Couldn't it
be an illusion (fake, imitation, etc.)?" or "Isn't it possible that you are
dreaming (hallucinating, etc.)?" is, in a certain important respect, quite
proper and appropriate even when there is no special reason to think you are
dreaming, hallucinating, confronting a fake and so on. For our knowledge

claims do entail that the evidence or grounds one has for believing would
not have been available if what one consequently believes (and claims to
know) were false; hence, they do entail that, given one's evidence or
grounds, it is false that one might be mistaken about what one purports to
know. (1) does entail the falsity of (3); hence, (1) can be shown to be
false not only by showing that S is dreaming or hallucinating or whatever, but also by showing that he might be, that his experience or
information on which he bases his belief that P can be had in such
circumstances as these without P being the case. It is not in the propriety
or relevance of these challenges that skepticism has gone awry. On the
contrary, the persistent and continuing appeal of skepticism lies in a
failure to come to grips with this challenge, in a refusal to acknowledge
its legitimacy and, hence, answer it. It simply will not do to insist that in
concerning himself with the possibility of mistake a skeptic is setting
artificially high standards for knowledge and, therefore, may be ignored
when considering ordinary knowledge claims. (1) does imply that (3) is
false, and it seems to me quite a legitimate line of argument for the
skeptic to insist that if (3) is true, if you might be dreaming or whatever,
then (1) is false - you do not know, on the basis of your present visual,
auditory, and other experiences, what you purport to know.
I think there are several confusions to be found in traditional skepticism, but one of them is not that of insisting that to know that P on the
basis of R, R must somehow preclude the possibility of not-P. The
confusions lie elsewhere. If one interprets the "might" (or "could") of
(3) too narrowly (as simply "logically possible") then, of course, (3) will,
in almost all interesting cases, turn out true and (therefore) (1) false.

25

Even if one liberalizes the interpretation of (3), and thinks of it as

representing some form of physical impossibility, as I have, there is still
the tendency to think of this physical impossibility in its most general
sense, as the impossibility of violating some natural law that holds in all
circumstances and not, as I have argued, the impossibility of having R
with not-P in the particular circumstances that in fact prevail on the
occasion in question. The most subtle confusion, however, is the one
mentioned in the preceding paragraphs - the fallacy of supposing that in
knowing that P we must somehow be able to justify the fact that we
know that P. Doubtless we should have some justification for (1) if we
assert it, but our lack of such a justification reflects not on the truth of
what we have said, but on the propriety of our saying it. What would show
that we did not know that P on the basis of R is the truth of (3), not
our incapacity to show it false (by showing (2) true for instance). For if
(2) is true, then, in answer to the skeptic's question, "Couldn't you be
hallucinating?" or "Might it not be a fake or imitation of some sort?"
the correct response, whether or not we know it to be correct, whether
or not we can show it to be correct, is "No!"
Still, even if one should accept the arguments up to this point, there
are genuine difficulties with taking as a sufficient condition for knowledge the possession of conclusive reasons to believe. I shall not try to
absorb these difficulties in this essay; I have tried to do so with respect
to a more restricted set of cases (visual perception) in another place.19
Whether these complications can be handled in the much more general
type of situation I have been discussing I leave open - only suggesting
the lines along which I think they can be satisfactorily handled. The two
examples I present do not affect my argument that the possession of
conclusive reasons is a necessary condition for knowledge.
S, upon inspecting an immersed chemical indicator, declares that the
solution in which it is immersed is a base. He believes (correctly) that
the indicator is the sort that turns from yellow to blue only when
immersed in a base. The indicator is Thymol Blue and would not have
turned from yellow to blue (in these conditions) unless the solution
were a base. The following three conditions are satisfied:
(A') The indicator's change in color (yellow to blue) is a conclusive reason for
believing that the solution is a base.

19

Seeing and Knowing (Chicago, 1969), Chapter III.

26

(B1) S believes that the solution is a base, and he believes this on the basis of the
indicator's change in color.
(C) S knows that the indicator changed from yellow to blue (he saw it change
saw that it changed).

I have said that these three conditions were sufficient for knowledge.
Does S know that the solution is a base? Before answering this question
the reader should be informed that there is another chemical indicator,
Bromophenal Blue, that also turns from yellow to blue but only when
immersed in an acid. S, however, is quite unaware of the existence of
other such indicators. He merely assumes that a yellow indicator turning
blue is a positive test for a base. S's ignorance on this point does not
alter the fact that the preceding three conditions are satisfied. Yet,
despite the satisfaction of these conditions, I find it (in some cases) most
implausible to say he knows that the solution is a base. Whether he
knows or not depends in a crucial way on our understanding of condition (B1). The indicator's change in color, although it is a conclusive
reason, has its conclusiveness, so to speak, restricted in scope to the
range of cases in which Thymol Blue is the indicator (or, if this laboratory uses only Thymol Blue, in which the indicator is from this laboratory or of the sort used in this laboratory). What is a conclusive reason
for believing the solution to be a base is that a Thymol Blue indicator (or
an indicator from this laboratory) changed from yellow to blue when
immersed in it, not simply that an (unspecified) chemical indicator
changed from yellow to blue. The fact that this indicator happens to be
Thymol Blue is what accounts for the truth of (A'). Since, however, it
is a Thymol Blue indicator's (or some other appropriately specified
indicator's) color transformation that is conclusive, we must (see condition (B')) require that S's basis for believing the solution to be a base be
that a Thymol Blue indicator (or such-and-such indicator) changed from

yellow to blue. He need not, once again, know that a Thymol Blue's
color transformation (or such-and-such indicator's transformation) is conclusive, but he must be exploiting those things about the indicator's
transformation in virtue of which it is conclusive. In some cases an A's being
B is a conclusive reason for believing P only in virtue of the fact that it
is, in particular, an A (or, say, something that is Q) that is B; in such
cases we must understand condition (B) as requiring that S's basis for
believing P include not only the fact that this (something or other) is B,
but also that this something or other is, in particular, an A (or something
that is Q). And this requires of us in addition that we understand

27

condition (C) that in such a way that S not only know that R is the
case, know (let us say) that A is B, but also know that it is, in particular,
an A that is B. 20
One further example to illustrate a distinct, but closely related, difficulty. Suppose K is behaving in such a way that it is true to say that he
would not be behaving in that way unless he was nervous. Suppose S
purports to know that K is nervous and, when asked how he knows
this, replies by saying, "From the way he is behaving." Once again, our
three conditions are satisfied or can easily be assumed to be satisfied.
Yet, if we suppose that the distinctive thing about K's behavior is that
he is doing Ba while performing B 2 , then if S is relying on B1 (or B2)
alone, we should not say that he knows that K is nervous. It is quite
true that the basis for S's belief (that K is nervous) is K's behavior, and
in this (relatively unspecified) sense we might say that S is relying on the
significant aspects of the situation, but the fact is that the crucial aspects
(those aspects that make K's behavior conclusive) are more specific than
those on which S is relying in purporting to know. We must insist,
therefore, that S's basis for believing P be as specific in regard to the
relevant aspects of R as is necessary to capture the distinctive (i.e.,
conclusive, those figuring essentially in the satisfaction of (2)) features of
the situation.
I think both of the preceding qualifications can be summarized by
saying that when one has conclusive reasons, then this is sufficient for
knowing that P is the case when those reasons are properly specific, both
with regard to what it is that displays the particular features on which
one relies and on the particular features themselves. A complete state20 This type of restriction is required for the sort of example discussed in my article "Reasons
and Consequences," Analysis, April 1968. In this article I argued that one could know
that the A is B (e.g., the widow was limping) while having little, if any, justification for
believing that it was, in particular, a widow who was limping (hence, one could know
that the widow was limping without knowing that it was a widow who was limping). Since,
however, the statement "The widow is limping" implies "There is (or it is) a widow who
is limping," I took this as showing that S can know that P, know that P entails Q, and
yet not know that Q. On the present analysis of conclusive reasons, of course, P is a
conclusive reason for Q (since P entails Q) and anyone who believed Q on the basis of P
should (on this analysis) know that Q. The restriction being discussed in the text blocks
this result by requiring S to know those things in particular about P that make it
conclusive for Q. In this example S must know that it is a widow who is limping since it
is this aspect of his conclusive reason (the widow is limping) in virtue of which it functions
as a conclusive reason for believing that there is a widow who is limping. I am indebted
to Bruce Freed for clarification on this point.

28

ment of these restrictions is, however, far beyond the scope of this essay.
Suffice it to say that the possession of conclusive reasons for believing is
a necessary condition for knowledge and, properly qualified along the
lines suggested here, also (I think) sufficient.

29

Epistemic Operators

Suppose Q is a necessary consequence of P. Given only this much, it is,

of course, quite trivial that if it is true that P, then it must also be true
that Q. If it is a fact that P, then it must also be a fact that Q. If it is
necessary that P, then it is necessary that Q; and if it is possible that P,
then it must also be possible that Q.
I have just mentioned four prefixes: "it is true that," "it is a fact
that," "it is necessary that," and "it is possible that." In this essay I shall
refer to such affixes as sentential operators or simply operators; when affixed
to a sentence or statement, they operate on it to generate another
sentence or statement. The distinctive thing about the four operators I
have just mentioned is that, if Q is a necessary consequence of P, then
the statement we get by operating on Q with one of these four operators
is a necessary consequence of the statement we get by operating on P
with the same operator. This may be put more succinctly if we let " O "
stand for the operator in question and "O(P)" for the statement we get
by affixing the operator " O " to the statement "P." We can now say
that the preceding four operators share the following property: if P
entails Q, then O(P) entails O(Q). I shall call any operator having this
property a penetrating operator (or, when emphasis is required, a fully
Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy 67(24), 1007-1023 (1970), by permission of the
publisher. Versions of this essay were read to the philosophy departments of several
universities in the United States and Canada during the year 1969-1970. I profited greatly
from these discussions. I wish especially to thank Paul Died, who helped me to see a
number of points more clearly (perhaps still not clearly enough, in his opinion). Finally,
my exchanges with Mr. Don AfFeldt were extremely useful; I am much indebted to him
in connection with some of the points made in the latter portions of the article.

30

penetrating operator). In operating on P these operators penetrate to every

necessary consequence of P.
We are now in a position to ask ourselves a preliminary question.
The answer to this question is easy enough, but it will set the stage for
more difficult questions. Are all sentential operators fully penetrating
operators? Are all operators such that if P entails Q, then O(P) entails
O(Q)? If all operators are penetrating operators, then each of the following statements must be true (when P entails Q):
(1) You cannot have a reason to believe that P unless you have a reason to
believe that Q.
(2) You cannot know that P unless you know that Q.
(3) You cannot explain why P is the case unless you can explain why Q is the
case.
(4) If you assert that P, then you assert that Q.
(5) If you hope that P, then you hope that Q.
(6) If it is strange (or accidental) that P, then it must be strange (or accidental)
that Q.
(7) If it was a mistake that P, then it was a mistake that Q.

This list begins with two epistemic operators, "reason to believe that"
and "know that." Since I shall be concerned with these later in the
essay, let me skip over them now and look at those appearing near the
end of the list. They will suffice to answer our opening question, and
their status is much less problematic than that of some of the other
operators.
"She lost" entails "Someone lost." Yet, it may be strange that she
lost, not at all strange that someone lost. "Bill and Susan married each
other" entails that Susan got married; yet, it may be quite odd that
(strange that, incredible that) Bill and Susan married each other but quite
unremarkable, not at all odd that, Susan got married. It may have been
a mistake that they married each other, not a mistake that Susan got
married. Or finally, "I hit the bull's-eye" entails that I either hit the
bull's-eye or the side of the barn; and although I admit that it was lucky
that (accidental that) I hit the bull's-eye, I will deny that it was lucky,
an accident, that I hit either the bull's-eye or the side of the barn.
Such examples show that not all operators are fully penetrating. Indeed, such operators as "it is strange that," "it is accidental that," and
"it is a mistake that" fail to penetrate to some of the most elementary
logical consequences of a proposition. Consider the entailment between

31

"P. Q" and " Q . " Clearly, it may be strange that P and Q, not at all
strange that P, and not at all strange that Q. A concatenation of factors,
no one of which is strange or accidental, may itself be strange or accidental. Taken by itself, there is nothing odd or suspicious about Frank's
holding a winning ticket in the first race. The same could be said about
any of the other races: there is nothing odd or suspicious about Frank's
holding a winning ticket in the nth race. Nonetheless, there is something
very odd, very suspicious, in Frank's having a winning ticket in n races.
Therefore, not only are these operators not fully penetrating, they lie,
as it were, on the other end of the spectrum. They fail to penetrate to
some of the most elementary consequences of a proposition. I shall refer
to this class of operators as nonpenetrating operators. I do not wish to
suggest by this label that such operators are totally impotent in this
respect (or that they are all uniform in their degree of penetration). I
mean it, rather, in a rough, comparative, sense: their degree of penetration
is less than that of any of the other operators I shall have occasion to
discuss.
We have, then, two ends of the spectrum with examples from both
ends. Anything that falls between these two extremes I shall call a
semipenetrating operator. And with this definition I am, finally, in a position to express my main point, the point I wish to defend in the rest of
this essay. It is, simply, that all epistemic operators are semipenetrating
operators. There is both a trivial and a significant side to this claim. Let
me first deal briefly with the trivial aspect.
The epistemic operators I mean to be speaking about when I say that
all epistemic operators are semipenetrating include the following:
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
(g)

S knows that. . .
5 sees (or can see) that. . .
5 has reason (or a reason) to believe that. . .
There is evidence to suggest that. . .
S can prove that. . .
S learned (discovered, found out) that. . .
In relation to our evidence it is probable that. . .

Part of what needs to be established in showing that these are all semipenetrating operators is that they all possess a degree of penetration
greater than that of the nonpenetrating operators. This is the trivial side
of my thesis. I say it is trivial because it seems to me fairly obvious that
if someone knows that P and Q, has a reason to believe that P and Q,
or can prove that P and Q, he thereby knows that Q, has a reason to

32

believe that Q, or can prove (in the appropriate epistemic sense of this
term) that Q. Similarly, if S knows that Bill and Susan married each
other, he (must) know that Susan got married (married someone). If he
knows that P is the case, he knows that P or Q is the case (where the
"or" is understood in a sense that makes " P or Q" a necessary consequence of "P"). This is not a claim about what it would be appropriate
to say, what the person himself thinks he knows or would say he knows.
It is a question, simply, of what he knows. It may not be appropriate to
say to Jim's wife that you know it was either her husband, Jim, or
Harold who sent the neighbor lady an expensive gift when you know it
was Harold. For, although you do know this, it is misleading to say you
know it especially to Jim's wife.
Let me accept, therefore, without further argument that the epistemic
operators are not, unlike "lucky that," "strange that," "a mistake that,"
and "accidental that," nonpenetrating operators. I would like to turn,
then, to the more significant side of my thesis. Before I do, however, I
must make one point clear lest it convert my entire thesis into something
as trivial as the first half of it. When we are dealing with the epistemic
operators, it becomes crucial to specify whether the agent in question
knows that P entails Q. That is to say, P may entail Q, and S may know
that P, but he may not know that Q because, and perhaps only because,
he fails to appreciate the fact that P entails Q. When Q is a simple
logical consequence of P we do not expect this to happen, but when
the propositions become very complex, or the relationship between
them very complex, this might easily occur. Let P b e a set of axioms, Q
a theorem. S's knowing P does not entail S's knowing Q just because P
entails Q; for, of course, S may not know that P entails Q, may not
know that Q is a theorem. Hence, our epistemic operators will turn out
not to be penetrating because, and perhaps only because, the agents in
question are not fully cognizant of all the implications of what they
know to be the case, can see to be the case, have a reason to believe is
the case, and so on. Were we all ideally astute logicians, were we all
fully apprised of all the necessary consequences (supposing this to be a
well defined class) of every proposition, perhaps then the epistemic
operators would turn into fully penetrating operators. That is, assuming
that if P entails Q, we know that P entails Q, then every epistemic
operator is a penetrating operator: the epistemic operators penetrate to
all the known consequences of a proposition.
It is this latter, slightly modified, claim that I mean to reject.
Therefore, I shall assume throughout the discussion that when Q is a

33

necessary consequence of P, every relevant agent knows that it is. I shall

be dealing with only the known consequences (in most cases because they
are immediate and obvious consequences). What I wish to show is that,
even under this special restriction, the epistemic operators are only semipenetrating.
I think many philosophers would disagree with this contention. The
conviction is that the epistemic worth of a proposition is hereditary
under entailment, that whatever the epistemic worth of P, at least the
same value must be accorded the known consequences of P. This conviction finds expression in a variety of ways. Epistemic logic: if S knows
that P, and knows that P entails Q, then 5 knows that Q. Probability
theory: if A is probable, and B is a logical consequence of A, then B is
probable (relative to the same evidence, of course). Confirmation theory: if evidence e tends to confirm hypothesis h, then e indirectly confirms all the logical consequences of h. But perhaps the best evidence in
favor of supposing that most philosophers have taken the epistemic
operators to be fully penetrating is the way they have argued and the
obvious assumptions that structure their arguments. Anyone who has
argued in the following way seems to me to be assuming the thesis of
penetrability (as I shall call it): if you do not know whether Q is true or
not, and P cannot be true unless Q is true, then you (obviously) do not
know whether P is true or not. A slightly more elaborate form of the
same argument goes like this: if 5 does not know whether or not Q is
true, then for all he knows it might be false. If Q is false, however, then
P must also be false. Hence, for all S knows, P may be false. Therefore,
S does not know that P is true. This pattern of argument is sprinkled
throughout the epistemological literature. Almost all skeptical objections
trade on it. S claims to know that this is a tomato. A necessary consequence of its being a tomato is that it is not a clever imitation that only
looks and feels (and, if you will, tastes) like a tomato. But S does not
know that it is not a clever imitation that only looks and feels (and tastes)
like a tomato. (I assume here that no one is prepared to argue that
anything that looks, feels, and tastes like a tomato to S must be a tomato.)
Therefore, S does not know that this is a tomato. We can, of course,
reply with G. E. Moore that we certainly do know it is a tomato (after
such an examination) and since tomatoes are not imitations we know
that this is not an imitation. It is interesting to note that this reply
presupposes the same principle as does the skeptical objection: they both
assume that if 5 knows that this is a P, and knows that every P is a Q,
then 5 knows that this is a Q. The only difference is that the skeptic

34

performs a modus tollens, Moore a modus ponens. Neither questions

the principle itself.
Whether it be a question of dreams or demons, illusions or fakes, the
same pattern of argument emerges. If you know this is a chair, you must
know that you are not dreaming (or being deceived by a cunning
demon), since its being a (real) chair entails that it is not simply a figment
of your own imagination. Such arguments assume that the epistemic
operators, and in particular the operator "to know," penetrate to all the
known consequences of a proposition. If these operators were not penetrating, many of these objections might be irrelevant. Consider the
following exchange:
S: How strange! There are tomatoes growing in my apple tree.
K: That isn't strange at all. Tomatoes, after all, are physical objects and
what is so strange about physical objects growing in your apple tree?
What makes K's reply so silly is that he is treating the operator "strange
that" as a fully penetrating operator: it cannot be strange that there are
tomatoes growing in the apple tree unless the consequences of this (e.g.,
there are objects growing in your apple tree) are also strange. Similarly,
it may not be at all relevant to object to someone who claims to know
that there are tomatoes in the apple tree that he does not know, cannot
be absolutely sure, that there are really any material objects. Whether or
not this is a relevant objection will depend on whether or not this
particular consequence of there being tomatoes in the apple tree is one
of the consequences to which the epistemic operators penetrate. What I
wish to argue in the remainder of this essay is that the traditional
skeptical arguments exploit precisely those consequences of a proposition
to which the epistemic operators do not penetrate, precisely those consequences that distinguish the epistemic operators from the fully penetrating operators.
In support of this claim let me begin with some examples that are, I
think, fairly intuitive and then turn to some more problematic cases. I
shall begin with the operator "reason to believe that," although what I
have to say could be said as well with any of them. This particular
operator has the added advantage that if it can be shown to be only
semipenetrating, then many accounts of knowledge, those that interpret
it as a form of justified true belief, would also be committed to treating
"knowing that" as a semipenetrating operator. For, presumably, "knowing that" would not penetrate any deeper than one's "reasons for believing that."

35

Suppose you have a reason to believe that the church is empty. Must
you have a reason to believe that it is a church? I am not asking whether
you generally have such a reason. I am asking whether one can have a
reason to believe the church empty without having a reason to believe
that it is a church that is empty. Certainly your reason for believing that
the church is empty is not itself a reason to believe it is a church; or it
need not be. Your reason for believing the church to be empty may be
that you just made a thorough inspection of it without finding anyone.
That is a good reason to believe the church empty. Just as clearly,
however, it is not a reason, much less a good reason, to believe that
what is empty is a church. The fact is, or so it seems to me, I do not
have to have any reason to believe it is a church. Of course, I would
never say the church was empty, or that I had a reason to believe that
the church was empty, unless I believed, and presumably had a reason
for so believing, that it was z church that was empty, but this is a
presumed condition of my saying something, not of my having a reason
to believe something. Suppose I had simply assumed (correctly as it turns
out) that the building was a church. Would this show that I had no
reason to believe that the church was empty?
Suppose I am describing to you the "adventures" of my brother
Harold. Harold is visiting New York for the first time, and he decides
to take a bus tour. He boards a crowded bus and immediately takes the
last remaining seat. The little old lady he shouldered aside in reaching
his seat stands over him glowering. Minutes pass. Finally, realizing that
my brother is not going to move, she sighs and moves resignedly to the
back of the bus. Not much of an adventure, but enough, I hope, to
make my point. I said that the little old lady realized that my brother
would not move. Does this imply that she realized that, or knew that, it
was my brother who refused to move? Clearly not. We can say that S
knows that X is Y without implying that S knows that it is X that is Y.
We do not have to describe our little old lady as knowing that the man
or the person would not move. We can say that she realized that, or
knew that, my brother would not move (minus, of course, this pattern of
emphasis), and we can say this because saying this does not entail that
the little old lady knew that, or realized that, it was my brother who
refused to move. She knew that my brother would not move, and she
knew this despite the fact that she did not know something that was
necessarily implied by what she did know - viz., that the person who
refused to move was my brother.
I have argued elsewhere that to see that A is B, that the roses are

36

wilted for example, is not to see, not even to be able to see, that they
are roses that are wilted.1 To see that the widow is limping is not to see
that it is a widow who is limping. I am now arguing that this same
feature holds for all epistemic operators. I can know that the roses are
wilting without knowing that they are roses, know that the water is
boiling without knowing that it is water, and prove that the square root
of 2 is smaller than the square root of 3 and, yet, be unable to prove
what is entailed by this viz., that the number 2 has a square root.
The general point may be put this way: there are certain presuppositions associated with a statement. These presuppositions, although their
truth is entailed by the truth of the statement, are not part of what is
operated on when we operate on the statement with one of our epistemic
operators. The epistemic operators do not penetrate to these presuppositions. For example, in saying that the coffee is boiling I assert that the
coffee is boiling, but in asserting this I do not assert that it is coffee that
is boiling. Rather, this is taken for granted, assumed, presupposed, or
what have you. Hence, when I say that I have a reason to believe that
the coffee is boiling, I am not saying that this reason applies to the fact
that it is coffee that is boiling. This is still presupposed. I may have such
a reason, of course, and chances are good that I do have such a reason
or I would not have referred to what I believe to be boiling as coffee, but
to have a reason to believe the coffee is boiling is not, thereby, to have
a reason to believe it is coffee that is boiling.
One would expect that if this is true of the semipenetrating operators,
then it should also be true of the nonpenetrating operators. They also
should fail to reach the presuppositions. This is exactly what we find. It
may be accidental that the two trucks collided, but not at all accidental
that it was two trucks that collided. Trucks were the only vehicles
allowed on the road that day, and so it was not at all accidental or a
matter of chance that the accident took place between two trucks. Still,
it was an accident that the two trucks collided. Or suppose Mrs. Murphy
mistakenly gives her cat some dog food. It need not be a mistake that
she gave the food to her cat, or some food to a cat. This was intentional.
What was a mistake was that it was dog food that she gave to her cat.
Hence, the first class of consequences that differentiate the epistemic
operators from the fully penetrating operators is the class of consequences associated with the presuppositions of a proposition. The fact
1

Seeing and Knowing (Chicago: University Press, 1969), pp. 93112, and also "Reasons and
Consequences," Analysis (April 1968).

37

that the epistemic operators do not penetrate to these presuppositions is

what helps to make them semipenetracing. And this is an extremely
important fact. For it would appear that if this is true, then to know that
the flowers are wilted I do not have to know that they are flowers (that
are wilted) and, therefore, do not have to know all those consequences
that follow from the fact that they are flowers, real flowers, that I know
to be wilted.
Rather than pursue this line, however, I would like to turn to what
I consider to be a more significant set of consequences "more significant" because they are the consequences that are directly involved in
most skeptical arguments. Suppose we assert that x is A. Consider some
predicate, "B," that is incompatible with A, such that nothing can be
both A and B. It then follows from the fact that x is A that x is not B.
Furthermore, if we conjoin B with any other predicate, Q, it follows
from the fact that x is A that x is not-(B and Q). I shall call this type of
consequence a contrast consequence, and I am interested in a particular
subset of these; for I believe the most telling skeptical objections to our
ordinary knowledge claims exploit a particular set of these contrast
consequences. The exploitation proceeds as follows: someone purports
to know that x is A, that the wall is red, say. The skeptic now finds a
predicate " B " that is incompatible with "A." In this particular example
we may let " B " stand for the predicate "is white." Since "x is red"
entails "x is not white" it also entails that x is not-(white and Q) where
" Q " is any predicate we care to select. Therefore, the skeptic selects a
" Q " that gives expression to a condition or circumstance under which
a white wall would appear exactly the same as a red wall. For simplicity
we may let " Q " stand for "cleverly illuminated to look red." We now
have this chain of implications: "x is red" entails "x is not white" entails
"x is not white cleverly illuminated to look red." If "knowing that" is
a penetrating operator, then if anyone knows that the wall is red he
must know that it is not white cleverly illuminated to look red. (I assume
here that the relevant parties know that if x is red, it cannot be white
made to look red.) He must know that this particular contrast consequence is true. The question is: do we, generally speaking, know anything of the sort? Normally we never take the trouble to check the
lighting. We seldom acquire any special reasons for believing the lighting
normal, although we can talk vaguely about there being no reason to
think it unusual. The fact is that we habitually take such matters for
granted, and although we normally have good reasons for making such
routine assumptions, I do not think these reasons are sufficiently good,

38

not without special precautionary checks in the particular case, to say of

the particular situation we are in that we know conditions are normal.
To illustrate, let me give you another example a silly one, but no
more silly than a great number of skeptical arguments with which we
are all familiar. You take your son to the zoo, see several zebras, and,
when questioned by your son, tell him they are zebras. Do you know
they are zebras? Well, most of us would have little hesitation in saying
that we did know this. We know what zebras look like, and, besides,
this is the city zoo and the animals are in a pen clearly marked "Zebras."
Yet, something's being a zebra implies that it is not a mule and, in
particular, not a mule cleverly disguised by the zoo authorities to look
like a zebra. Do you know that these animals are not mules cleverly
disguised by the zoo authorities to look like zebras? If you are tempted
to say "Yes" to this question, think a moment about what reasons you
have, what evidence you can produce in favor of this claim. The evidence you had for thinking them zebras has been effectively neutralized,
since it does not count toward their not being mules cleverly disguised
to look like zebras. Have you checked with the zoo authorities? Did
you examine the animals closely enough to detect such a fraud? You
might do this, of course, but in most cases you do nothing of the kind.
You have some general uniformities on which you rely, regularities to
which you give expression by such remarks as "That isn't very likely"
or "Why should the zoo authorities do that?" Granted, the hypothesis
(if we may call it that) is not very plausible, given what we know about
people and zoos. But the question here is not whether this alternative is
plausible, not whether it is more or less plausible than that there are real
zebras in the pen, but whether you know that this alternative hypothesis
is false. I don't think you do. In this I agree with the skeptic. I part
company with the skeptic only when he concludes from this that,
therefore, you do not know that the animals in the pen are zebras. I part
with him because I reject the principle he uses in reaching this conclusion the principle that if you do not know that Q is true, when it is
known that P entails Q, then you do not know that P is true.
What I am suggesting is that we simply admit that we do not know
that some of these contrasting "skeptical alternatives" are not the case,
but refuse to admit that we do not know what we originally said we
knew. My knowing that the wall is red certainly entails that the wall is
red; it also entails that the wall is not white and, in particular, it entails
that the wall is not white cleverly illuminated to look red. But it does
not follow from the fact that I know that the wall is red that I know that

39

it is not white cleverly illuminated to look red. N o r does it follow from

the fact that I k n o w that those animals are zebras that I k n o w that they
are not mules cleverly disguised to look like zebras. These are some of
the contrast consequences to which the epistemic operators do not
penetrate.
Aside from asserting this, what arguments can be produced to support
it? I could proceed by multiplying examples, but I do not think that
examples alone will support the full weight of this view. T h e thesis itself
is sufficiently counterintuitive to render controversial most of the crucial
examples. Anyone w h o is already convinced that skepticism is wrong
and w h o is yet troubled by the sorts of skeptical arguments I have
mentioned will, no doubt, take this itself as an argument in favor of my
claim that the epistemic operators are only semipenetrating. This, h o w ever, hardly constitutes an argument against skepticism. For this we need
independent grounds for thinking that the epistemic operators do not
penetrate to the contrast consequences. So I shall proceed in a more
systematic manner. I shall offer an analogy with three other operators
and conclude by making some general remarks about what I think can
be learned from this analogy. T h e first operator is "explains w h y " or,
more suggestively (for the purposes of this analogy):
(A) R is the reason (explanatory reason) that (or why) . . .
For example, the reason S quit smoking was that he was afraid of getting
cancer. T h e second operator has to do with reasons again, but in this
case it is a reason that tends to justify one in doing something:
(B) R is a reason for . . . (S to do Y).2
For example, the fact that they are selling the very same (type of) car
here much more cheaply than elsewhere is a reason to buy it here rather
than elsewhere. T h e status of this as a reason will, of course, depend on
a variety of circumstances, but situations can easily be imagined in which
this would be a reason for someone to buy the car here. Finally, there is
a particular modal relationship which may be construed as a sentential
operator:
(C) R would not be the case unless . . .

Unlike our other operators, this one does not have a propositional operand. Despite the
rather obvious differences between this case and the others, I still think it useful to call
attention to its analogous features.

40

For example, he would not have bid seven no-trump unless he had all
four aces. I shall abbreviate this operator as "R ..."; hence, our
example could be written "he bid seven no-trump > he had all four
aces."
Each of these operators has features similar to those of our epistemic
operators. If one retraces the ground we have already covered, one will
find, I think, that these operators all penetrate deeper than the typical
nonpenetrating operator. If R explains why (or is the reason that) P and
Q are the case, then it explains why (is the reason that) Q is the case.3 If
I can explain why Bill and Harold are always invited to every party, I
can explain why Harold is always invited to every party. From the fact
that it was a mistake for me to quit my job it does not follow that it was
a mistake for me to do something, but if I had a reason to quit my job,
it does follow that I had a reason to do something. And if the grass
would not be green unless it had plenty of sunshine and water, it follows
that it would not be green unless it had water.
Furthermore, the similarities persist when one considers the presuppositional consequences. I argued that the epistemic operators fail to
penetrate to the presuppositions; the preceding three operators display
the same feature. In explaining why he takes his lunch to work, I do
not (or need not) explain why he goes to work or why he works at all.
The explanation may be obvious in some cases, of course, but the fact
is, I need not be able to explain why he works (he is so wealthy) to
explain why he takes his lunch to work (the cafeteria food is so bad).
The reason the elms on Main Street are dying is not the reason there are
elms on Main Street. I have a reason to feed my cat, no reason (not, at
least, the same reason) to have a cat. And although it is quite true that
he would not have known about our plans if the secretary had not told
him, it does not follow that he would not have known about our plans
if someone other than the secretary had told him. That is, (He knew about
our plans) (The secretary told him) even though it is not true that
(He knew about our plans) > (It was the secretary who told him). Yet,
the fact that it was the secretary who told him is (I take it) a presupposiOne must be careful not to confuse sentential conjunction with similar-sounding expressions involving a relationship between two things. For example, to say Bill and Susan got
married (if it is intended to mean that they married each other), although it entails that Susan
got married, does not do so by simplification. "Reason why" penetrates through logical
simplification, not through the type of entailment represented by these two propositions.
That is, the reason they got married is that they loved each other; that they loved each
other is not the reason Susan got married.

41

tional consequence of the fact that the secretary told him. Similarly, if
George is out to set fire to the first empty building he finds, it may be
true to say that George would not have set fire to the church unless it
(the church) was empty yet false to say that George would not have set
fire to the church unless it was a church.
I now wish to argue that these three operators do not penetrate to a
certain set of contrast consequences. To the extent that the epistemic
operators are similar to these operators, we may then infer, by analogy,
that they also fail to penetrate to certain contrast consequences. This is,
admittedly, a weak form of argument, depending as it does on the
grounds there are for thinking that the preceding three operators and
the epistemic operators share the same logic in this respect. Nonetheless,
the analogy is revealing. Some may even find it persuasive.4
(A) The pink walls in my living room clash with my old green
couch. Recognizing this, I proceed to paint the walls a compatible shade
of green. This is the reason I have, and give, for painting the walls green.
Now, in having this explanation for why I painted the walls green, I do
not think I have an explanation for two other things, both of which are
entailed by what I do have an explanation for. I have not explained why
I did not, instead of painting the walls green, buy a new couch or cover
the old one with a suitable slip cover. Nor have I explained why, instead
of painting the walls green, I did not paint them white and illuminate
them with green light. The same effect would have been achieved, the
same purpose would have been served, albeit at much greater expense.
I expect someone to object as follows: although the explanation given
for painting the walls green does not, by itself, explain why the couch
was not changed instead, it nonetheless succeeds as an explanation for
why the walls were painted green only insofar as there is an explanation
for why the couch was not changed instead. If there is no explanation
for why I did not change the couch instead, there has been no real, no
complete, examination for why the walls were painted green.
I think this objection wrong. I may, of course, have an explanation
for why I did not buy a new couch: I love the old one or it has
I think that those who are inclined to give a causal account of knowledge should be
particularly interested in the operator "R ..." since, presumably, it will be involved in
many instances of knowledge ("many," not "all," since one might wish to except some
form of immediate knowledge - knowledge of one's own psychological state - from the
causal account). If this operator is only semipenetrating, then any account of knowledge
that relies on the relationship expressed by this operator (as I believe causal accounts must)
will be very close to giving a semipenetrating account of "knowing that."

42

sentimental value. But then again I may not. It just never occurred to
me to change the couch; or (if someone thinks that its not occurring to
me is an explanation of why I did not change the couch) I may have
thought of it but decided, for what reasons (if any) I cannot remember,
to keep the couch and paint the walls. That is to say, I cannot explain
why I did not change the couch. I thought of it but I did not do it. I
do not know why. Still, I can tell you why I painted the walls green.
They clashed with the couch.
(B) The fact that they are selling Xs so much more cheaply here than
elsewhere may be a reason to buy your Xs here, but it certainly need
not be a reason to do what is a necessary consequence of buying your Xs
here viz., not stealing your Xs here.
(C) Let us suppose that S is operating in perfectly normal circumstances, a set of circumstances in which it is true to say that the wall he
sees would not (now) look green to him unless it was green (if it were
any other color it would look different to him). Although we can easily
imagine situations in which this is true, it does not follow that the wall
would not (now) look green to 5 if it were white cleverly illuminated
to look green. That is,
(i) The wall looks green (to S) the wall is green.
(ii) The wall is green entails that the wall is not white cleverly illuminated to
look green (to S).
are both true; yet, it is not true that
(iii) The wall looks green (to S) > is not white cleverly illuminated to look
green (to S).
There are dozens of examples that illustrate the relative impenetrability
of this operator. We can truly say that A and B would not have collided
if B had not swerved at the last moment and yet concede that they
would have collided without any swerve on the part of B if the direction
in which A was moving had been suitably altered in the beginning.5
The explanation for why the modal relationship between R and P (R > P) fails to carry
over (penetrate) to the logical consequences of P (i.e., R Q where Q is a logical
consequence of P) is to be found in the set of circumstances that are taken as given, or held
fixed, in subjunctive conditionals. There are certain logical consequences of P that, by
bringing in a reference to circumstances tacitly held fixed in the original subjunctive (R
P), introduce a possible variation in these circumstances and, hence, lead to a different
framework of fixed conditions under which to assess the truth of R > Q. For instance, in
the last example in the text, when it is said that A and B would not have collided if B had

43

The structure of these cases is virtually identical with the one that
appeared in the case of the epistemic operators, and I think that by
looking just a little more closely at this structure we can learn something
very fundamental about our class of epistemic operators and, in particular, about what it means to know something. If I may put it this way,
within the context of these operators no fact is an island. If we are
simply rehearsing the facts, then we can say that it is a fact that Brenda
did not take any dessert (although it was included in the meal). We
can say this without a thought about what sort of person Brenda is or
what she might have done had she ordered dessert. However, if we
put this fact into, say, an explanatory context, if we try to explain this
fact, it suddenly appears within a network of related facts, a network
of possible alternatives that serve to define what it is that is being explained.
What is being explained is a function of two things not only the fact
(Brenda did not order any dessert), but also the range of relevant alternatives. A relevant alternative is an alternative that might have been
realized in the existing circumstances if the actual state of affairs had
not materialized.6 When I explain why Brenda did not order any dessert
by saying that she was full (was on a diet, did not like anything on the
dessert menu), I explain why she did not order any dessert rather than,
as opposed to, or instead of ordering some dessert and eating it. It is this

competing possibility that helps to define what it is that I am explaining

when I explain why Brenda did not order any dessert. Change this

not swerved at the last moment, the truth of this conditional clearly takes it as given that A
and B possessed the prior trajectories they in fact had on the occasion in question. Given
certain facts, including the fact that they were traveling in the direction they were, they
would not have collided if B had not swerved. Some of the logical consequences of the
statement that B swerved do not, however, leave these conditions unaltered e.g., B did
not move in a perfectly straight line in a direction 2 counterclockwise to the direction it
actually moved. This consequence "tinkers" with the circumstances originally taken as
given (held fixed), and a failure of penetration will usually arise when this occurs. It need not
be true that A and B would not have collided if B had moved in a perfectly straight line in
a direction 2 counterclockwise to the direction it actually moved.
6 I am aware that this characterization of "a relevant alternative" is not, as it stands, very
illuminating. I am not sure I can make it more precise. What I am after can be expressed
this way: if Brenda had ordered dessert, she would not have thrown it at the waiter, stuffed
it in her shoes, or taken it home to a sick friend (she has no sick friend). These are not
alternatives that might have been realized in the existing circumstances if the actual state of
affairs had not materialized. Hence, they are not relevant alternatives. In other words, the
"might have been" in my characterization of a relevant alternative will have to be unpacked
in terms of counterfactuals.

44

contrast, introduce a different set of relevant alternatives, and you change

what it is that is being explained and, therefore, what counts as an
explanation, even though (as it were) the same fact is being explained.
Consider the following contrasts: ordering some dessert and throwing
it at the waiter; ordering some dessert and taking it home to a sick
friend. With these contrasts none of the preceding explanations are any
longer explanations of why Brenda did not order dessert. Anyone who
really wants to know why Brenda did not order dessert and throw it
at the waiter will not be helped by being told that she was full or on
a diet. This is only to say that, within the context of explanation and
within the context of our other operators, the proposition on which
we operate must be understood as embedded within a matrix of relevant
alternatives. We explain why P, but we do so within a framework of
competing alternatives A, B, and C. Moreover, if the possibility D is
not within this contrasting set, not within this network of relevant
alternatives, then even though not-D follows necessarily from the fact,
P, which we do explain, we do not explain why not-D. Although the
fact that Brenda did not order dessert and throw it at the waiter follows
necessarily from the fact that she did not order dessert (the fact that is
explained), this necessary consequence is not explained by the explanation given. The only contrast consequences to which this operator
penetrates are those that figured in the original explanation as relevant
alternatives.
So it is with our epistemic operators. To know that x is A is to know
that x is A within a framework of relevant alternatives, B, C, and D.
This set of contrasts, together with the fact that x is A, serves to define
what it is that is known when one knows that x is A. One cannot
change this set of contrasts without changing what a person is said to
know when he is said to know that x is A. We have subtle ways of
shifting these contrasts and, hence, changing what a person is said to
k n o w without changing the sentence that we use to express what he knows.

Take the fact that Lefty killed Otto. By changing the emphasis pattern
we can invoke a different set of contrasts and, hence, alter what it is that
S is said to know when he is said to know that Lefty killed Otto. We
can say, for instance, that S knows that Lefty killed Otto. In this case
(and I think this is the way we usually hear the sentence when there is
no special emphasis) we are being told that 5 knows the identity of
Otto's killer, that it was Lefty who killed Otto. Hence, we expect S's
reasons for believing that Lefty killed Otto to consist in facts that single

45

out Lefty as the assailant rather than George, Mike, or someone else. On
the other hand, we can say that S knows that Lefty killed Otto. In this
case we are being told that S knows what Lefty did to Otto; he killed him
rather than merely injuring him, killed him rather than merely threatening
him, and so on. A good reason for believing that Lefty killed Otto (rather
than merely injuring him) is that Otto is dead, but this is not much of a
reason, if it is a reason at all, for believing that Lefty killed Otto.
Changing the set of contrasts (from "Lefty rather than George or Mike"
to "killed rather than injured or threatened") by shifting the emphasis
pattern changes what it is that one is alleged to know when one is said
to know that Lefty killed Otto. 7 The same point can be made here as
we made in the case of explanation: the operator will penetrate only to
those contrast consequences that form part of the network of relevant
alternatives structuring the original context in which a knowledge claim
was advanced. Just as we have not explained why Brenda did not order
some dessert and throw it at the waiter when we explained why she did
not order some dessert (although what we have explained her not
ordering any dessert entails this), so also in knowing that Lefty killed
Otto (knowing that what Lefty did to Otto was kill him) we do not
necessarily (although we may) know that Lefty killed Otto (know that it
was Lefty who killed Otto). Recall the example of the little old lady who
knew that my brother would not move without knowing that it was
my brother who would not move.
The conclusions to be drawn are the same as those in the case of
explanation. Just as we can say that within the original setting, within
the original framework of alternatives that defined what we were trying
to explain, we did explain why Brenda did not order any dessert, so also
within the original setting, within the set of contrasts that defined what
it was we were claiming to know, we did know that the wall was red
and did know that it was a zebra in the pen.
To introduce a novel and enlarged set of alternatives, as the skeptic is
inclined to do with our epistemic claims, is to exhibit consequences of
what we know, or have reason to believe, that we may not know, may
not have a reason to believe; but it does not show that we did not
know, did not have a reason to believe, whatever it is that has these

The same example works nicely with the operator "R >. . . ." It may be true to say that
Otto would not be dead unless Lefty killed him (unless what Lefty did to him was kill him)
without its being true that Otto would not be dead unless Lefty killed him (unless it was
Lefty who killed him).

46

consequences. To argue in this way is, I submit, as much a mistake as

arguing that we have not explained why Brenda did not order dessert
(within the original, normal, setting) because we did not explain why
she did not order some and throw it at the waiter.

47

3
The Pragmatic Dimension
of Knowledge

Knowing that something is so, unlike being wealthy or reasonable, is

not a matter of degree. Two people can both be wealthy, yet one can
be wealthier than the other; both be reasonable, yet one be more
reasonable than the other. When talking about people, places, and topics
(things rather than facts), it makes sense to say that one person knows
something better than another. He knows the city better than we do,
knows more Russian history than any of his colleagues, but doesn't
know his wife as well as do his friends. But factual knowledge, the
knowledge that something is so, does not admit of such comparisons.1 If
we both know that today is Friday, it makes no sense to say that you
know this better than I. A rich man can become richer by acquiring
more money, and a person's belief (that today is Saturday, for example)
can be made more reasonable by the accumulation of additional evidence, but if a person already knows that today is Friday, there is nothing
he can acquire that will make him know it better. Additional evidence
will not promote him to a loftier form of knowledge although it may
make him more certain of something he already knew. You can boil water
beyond its boiling point (e.g., at 300 F) but you are not, thereby,
boiling it better. You are simply boiling it at a higher temperature.
In this respect factual knowledge is absolute. It is like being pregnant:
an all-or-nothing affair. One person cannot be more pregnant or pregnant
Reprinted from Philosophical Studies 40 (1981), 363-378, copyright 1981 by Kluwer
Academic Publishers, with kind permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers.
I know we sometimes say things that suggest a comparison of this sort (e.g., No one knows
better than I that there are a lot of mosquitoes in the Northwest Territories), but I take
such constructions to be describing not better knowledge, but more direct, more compelling, kinds of evidence.

48

better than someone else. Those who view knowledge as a form of

justified (true) belief typically acknowledge this fact by speaking not
simply ofjustification, but offull, complete, or adequate justification. Those
qualifications on the sort of justification required to know something
constitute an admission that knowledge is, whereas justification is not,
an absolute idea. For these qualifiers are meant to reflect the fact that
there is a certain threshold of justification that must be equaled or
exceeded if knowledge is to be obtained, and equaling or exceeding this
threshold is, of course, an absolute idea. I can have a better justification
than you, but my justification cannot be more adequate (more sufficient,
more full) than yours. If my justification is complete in the intended
sense, then your justification cannot be more complete.
Philosophers who view knowledge as some form of justified true
belief are generally reluctant to talk about this implied threshold of
justification. Just how much evidence or justification, one wants to ask,
is enough to qualify as an adequate, a full, or a complete justification? If
the level or degree of justification is represented by real numbers between 0 and 1 (indicating the conditional probability of that for which
one has evidence or justification), any threshold less than 1 seems arbitrary. Why, for example, should a justification of 0.95 be good enough
to know something when a justification of 0.94 is not adequate? And if
one can know P because one's justification is 0.95 and know Q because
one's justification is similarly high, is one excluded from knowing P and
Q because the justification for their joint occurrence has (in accordance
with the multiplicative rule in probability theory) dropped below 0.95?
Aside, though, from its arbitrariness, any threshold ofjustification less
than 1 seems to be too low. For examples can easily be given in which
such thresholds are exceeded without the justification being good enough
(by ordinary intuitive standards) for knowledge. For example, if the
threshold is set at 0.95, one need only think of a bag with 96 white balls
and 4 black balls in it. If someone draws a ball at random from this bag,
the justification for believing it to be white exceeds the 0.95 threshold.
Yet, it seems clear (to me at least) that such a justification (for believing
that a white ball has been drawn) is not good enough. Someone who
happened to draw a white ball, and believed he drew a white ball on
the basis of this justification, would not know that he drew a white ball.
Examples such as this suggest (although they do not, of course, prove)
that the absolute, noncomparative character of knowledge derives from
the absoluteness, or conclusiveness, of the justification required to know.
If I know that the Russians invaded Afghanistan, you can't know this

49

better than I know it because in order to know it I must already have

an optimal, or conclusive, justification (a justification at the level of 1),
and you can't do better than that. I have explored this possibility in
other essays, and I do not intend to pursue it here.2 What I want to
develop in this essay is a different theme, one that (I hope) helps to
illuminate our concept of knowledge by showing how this absolute idea
can, despite its absoluteness, remain sensitive to the shifting interests,
concerns, and factors influencing its everyday application. In short, I
want to explore the way, and the extent to which, this absolute notion
exhibits a degree of contextual relativity in its ordinary use.
To do this it will be useful to briefly recapitulate Peter Unger's
discussion of absolute concepts.3 Although he misinterprets its significance, Unger does, I think, locate the important characteristic of this
class of concepts. He illustrates the point with the term flat. This, he
argues, is an absolute term in the sense that a surface is flat only if it is
not at all bumpy or irregular. Any bumps or irregularities, however small
and insignificant they may be (from a practical point of view), mean that
the surface on which they occur is not really flat. It may be almost flat,
or very nearly flat, but (as both these expressions imply) it is not really
flat. We do, it seems, compare surfaces with respect to their degree of
flatness (e.g., West Texas is flatter than Wisconsin), but Unger argues
that this must be understood as a comparison of the degree to which
these surfaces approximate flatness. They cannot both be flat and, yet,
one be flatter than the other. Hence, if A is flatter than B, then B
(perhaps also A) is not really flat. Flatness does not admit of degrees,
although a surface's nearness to being flat does, and it is this latter
magnitude that we are comparing when we speak of one surface being
flatter than another.
Unger concludes from this analysis that not many things are really
flat. For under powerful enough magnification almost any surface will
exhibit some irregularities. Hence, contrary to what we commonly say
(and, presumably, believe), these surfaces are not really flat. When we
describe them as being flat, what we say is literally false. Probably nothing
is really flat. So be it. This, according to Unger, is the price we pay for
having absolute concepts.
If knowledge is absolute in this way, then there should be similar

"Conclusive reasons," Australasian Journal of Philosophy (May 1971) and Seeing and Knowing

(University of Chicago Press, 1969).

3 Peter Unger, "A defense of skepticism," Philosophical Review 80 (1971).

50

objections to its widespread application to everyday situations. Powerful

magnification (i.e., critical inquiry) should, and with the help of the
skeptic has, revealed "bumps" and "irregularities" in our evidential
posture with respect to most of the things we say we know. There are
always, it seems, possibilities that our evidence is powerless to eliminate,
possibilities that until eliminated, block the road to knowledge. For if
knowledge, being an absolute concept, requires the elimination of all
competing possibilities (possibilities that contrast with what is known),
then, clearly we seldom, if ever, satisfy the conditions for applying the
concept.
This skeptical conclusion is unpalatable to most philosophers. Unger
endorses it. Knowledge, according to him, is an absolute concept that,
like flatness, has very little application to our bumpy, irregular world.
I have in one respect already indicated my agreement with Unger.
Knowledge is an absolute concept (I disagree with him, however, about
the source of this absoluteness; Unger finds it in the certainty required for
knowledge; I find it in the justification required for knowledge). Unlike
Unger, though, I do not derive skeptical conclusions from this fact. I
will happily admit that flat is an absolute concept, and absolute in
roughly the way Unger says it is, but I do not think this shows that
nothing is really flat. For although nothing can be flat if it has any bumps
and irregularities, what counts as a bump or irregularity depends on the
type of surface being described. Something is empty (another absolute
concept, according to Unger) if it has nothing in it, but this does not
mean that an abandoned warehouse is not really empty because it has
light bulbs or molecules in it. Light bulbs and molecules do not count
as things when determining the emptiness of warehouses. For purposes
of determining the emptiness of a warehouse, molecules (dust, light
bulbs, etc.) are irrelevant. This isn't to say that, if we changed the way
we used warehouses (e.g., if we started using, or trying to use, warehouses as giant vacuum chambers), they still wouldn't count. It is only
to say that, given the way they are now used, air molecules (dust
particles, etc.) don't count.
Similarly, a road can be perfectly flat even though one can feel and see
irregularities in its surface, irregularities that, were they to be found on
the surface of, say, a mirror would mean that the mirror's surface was
not really flat. Large mice are not large animals and flat roads are not
necessarily flat surfaces. The Flat Earth Society is certainly an anachronism, but it is not denying the existence of ant hills and gopher holes.
Absolute concepts depict a situation as being completely devoid of a

51

certain sort of thing: bumps in the case of flatness and objects in the case
of emptiness. The fact that there can be nothing of this sort present for
the concept to be satisfied is what makes it an absolute concept. It is
why if Xis empty, Y cannot be emptier. Nonetheless, when it comes to
determining what counts as a thing of this sort (a bump or an object),
and hence what counts against a correct application of the concept, we
find the criteria or standards peculiarly spongy and relative. What counts
as a thing for assessing the emptiness of my pocket may not count as a
thing for assessing the emptiness of a park, a warehouse, or a football
stadium. Such concepts, we might say, are relationally aboslute; absolute,
yes, but only relative to a certain standard. We might put the point this
way: to be empty is to be devoid of all relevant things, thereby exhibiting,
simultaneously, the absolute (in the word "all") and relative (in the
word "relevant") character of this concept.
If, as I have suggested, knowledge is an absolute concept, we should
expect it to exhibit this kind of relationally absolute character. This,
indeed, is the possibility I mean to explore in this essay. What I propose
to do is to use what I have called relationally absolute concepts as a
model for understanding knowledge. In accordance with this approach
(and in harmony with an earlier suggestion) I propose to think of
knowledge as an evidential state in which all relevant alternatives (to what
is known) are eliminated. This makes knowledge an absolute concept, but
the restriction to relevant alternatives makes it, like empty and flat, applicable to this epistemically bumpy world we live in.
Why do this? What are the advantages? A partial catalog of benefits
follows:
(1) A growing number of philosophers are able to find, or so they
claim, a pragmatic, social, or communal dimension to knowledge.4 A

I have in mind Harman's discussion in: Thought (Princeton, 1973) of evidence one does
not possess, Goldman's barn example in "Discrimination and perceptual knowledge," The
Journal of Philosophy 73.20 (1976), the sorts of examples appearing in various Defeasibility
analyses of knowledge (see Keith Lehrer and Thomas Paxson, Jr., "Knowledge: Undefeated
justified true belief," Journal of Philosophy 66.8 [1969] and Peter Klein, "A proposed
definition of propositional knowledge," Journal of Philosophy, 68.16 [1971], Ernest Sosa's
recommendation (in "How do you know?", American Philosophical Quarterly 11.2 [1974])
that we must depart from the traditional conception of knowledge by putting in relief the
relativity of knowledge to an epistemic community (p. 117), and David Annis's "A contextualist theory of epistemic justification," American Philosophical Quarterly, 15.3 (1978), in
which the basic model of justification (and presumably of knowledge) revolves around a
person's being able to meet certain objections. The trend here, if this is a trend, seems to

52

variety of examples indicate, or seem to these philosophers to indicate,

that knowledge depends not just on the evidential status of the knower
vis-a-vis what is known, but also on such factors as the general availability, and proximity, of (misleading) counterevidence, on the sorts of
things that are commonly taken for granted by others in the relevant
community, on the interests and purposes of speakers (in claiming to
know) and listeners (in being told that someone knows), and the importance or significance of what is known or someone's knowing it. I,
personally, happen to think that most of these examples show nothing
of the kind. These factors affect not whether something is known, but
whether it is reasonable to say you know or to think you know. But, for
the moment, I do not want to argue the point. I merely wish to point
out that insofar as knowledge is a function of such pragmatic, social, or
communal factors, the present approach to its analysis can absorb this
relativity without compromising the absoluteness of knowledge itself.
The social or pragmatic dimension to knowledge, if it exists at all, has
to do with what counts as a relevant alternative, a possibility that must be
evidentially excluded, in order to have knowledge. It does not change
the fact that to know, one must be in a position to exclude all such
possibilities. It does not alter the fact that one must have, in this sense,
an optimal justification one that eliminates every (relevant) possibility
of being mistaken.
(2) Secondly, this approach to the analysis of knowledge helps to
avoid the proliferation of senses that sometimes threatens to engulf epistemological discussions. We don't have different senses of the verb "to
know" a strong sense here, a weak sense there but one sense with
different applications. We don't have two senses of the word "empty"
one for pockets and one for warehouses. We have one sense (or meaning) with a difference in what counts as a thing.
(3) Thirdly, we get a better perspective from which to understand
the persisting and undiminished appeal of skeptical arguments. Most
philosophers have experienced the futility of trying to convince a devoted skeptic, or just a newly converted freshman, that we do know
there are tables and chairs despite the possibility of dreams, hallucinations,
cunning demons, and diabolical scientists who might be toying with our

be toward the kind of relativity espoused by Thomas Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).

53

brain on Alpha Centuri (Nozick's example). Somehow, in the end, we

seem reduced to shrugging our shoulders and saying that there are
certain possibilities that are just too remote to worry about. Our evidence isn't good enough to eliminate these wilder hypotheses because,
of course, these wild hypotheses are carefully manufactured so as to
neutralize our evidence. But dismissing such hypotheses as too remote to
worry about, as too fanciful to have any impact on our ordinary use of
the verb "to know," is merely another way of saying that for purposes
of assessing someone's knowledge that this is a table, certain alternative
possibilities are simply not relevant. We are doing the same thing (or so
I submit) as one who dismisses chalk dust as irrelevant, or too insignificant, to worry about in describing a classroom as empty. What it is
important to realize, especially in arguments with the skeptic, is that the
impatient dismissal of his fanciful hypotheses is not (as he will be quick
to suggest) a mere practical intolerance, and refusal to confront, decisive
objections to our ordinary way of talking. It is, rather, a half-conscious
attempt to exhibit the relationally absolute character of our cognitive
concepts.
(4) Finally, this approach to the analysis of knowledge gives us the
kind of machinery we need to handle the otherwise puzzling examples
that are becoming more frequent in the epistemological literature.
Consider yet one more example (one more because this one, I think,
combines elements of several of the more familiar examples). An amateur bird-watcher spots a duck on his favorite Wisconsin pond. He
quickly notes its familiar silhouette and markings and makes a mental
note to tell his friends that he saw a Gadwall, a rather unusual bird in
that part of the Midwest. Since the Gadwall has a distinctive set of
markings (black rump, white patch on the hind edge of the wing,
etc.), markings that no other North American duck exhibits, and these
markings were all perfectly visible, it seems reasonable enough to say
that the bird-watcher knows that yonder bird is a Gadwall. He can see
that it is.
Nevertheless, a concerned ornithologist is poking around in the vicinity, not far from where our bird-watcher spotted his Gadwall, looking
for some trace of Siberian grebes. Grebes are ducklike water birds, and
the Siberian version of this creature is, when it is in the water, very hard
to distinguish from a Gadwall duck. Accurate identification requires
seeing the birds in flight since the Gadwall has a white belly and the
Grebe a red belly features that are not visible when the birds are in
the water. The ornithologist has a hypothesis that some Siberian grebes

54

have been migrating to the Midwest from their home in Siberia, and he
and his research assistants are combing the Midwest in search of confirmation.
Once we embellish our simple story in this way, intuitions start to
diverge on whether our amateur bird-watcher does indeed know that
yonder bird is a Gadwall duck (we are assuming, of course, that it is a
Gadwall). Most people (I assume) would say that he did not know the
bird to be a Gadwall if there actually were Siberian grebes in the vicinity.
It certainly sounds strange to suppose that he could give assurances to
the ornithologist that the bird he saw was not a Siberian grebe (since he
knew it to be a Gadwall duck). But what if the ornithologist's suspicions
are unfounded? None of the grebes have migrated. Does the birdwatcher still not know what he takes himself to know? Is, then, the
simple presence of an ornithologist, with his false hypothesis, enough to
rob the bird-watcher of his knowledge that the bird on the pond is a
Gadwall duck? What if we suppose that the Siberian grebes, because of
certain geographical barriers, cannot migrate? Or suppose that there really
are no Siberian grebes the existence of such a bird being a delusion of
a crackpot ornithologist. We may even suppose that, in addition to there
being no grebes, there is no ornithologist of the sort I described, but
that people in the area believe that there is. Or some people believe that
there is. Or the bird-watcher's wife believes that there is and, as a result,
expresses skepticism about his claim to know that what he saw was a
Gadwall duck. Or, finally, although no one believes any of this, some of
the locals are interested in whether or not our bird-watcher knows that
there are no look-alike migrant grebes in the area.
Somewhere in this progression philosophers, most of them anyway,
will dig in their heels and say that the bird-watcher really does know that
the bird he sees is a Gadwall, and that he knows this despite his inability
to justifiably rule out certain alternative possibilities. For example, if
there are no look-alike grebes and no ornithologist of the sort I described, but the bird-watcher's wife believes that there are (a rumour
she heard from her hairdresser), this does not rob him of his knowledge
that the bird he saw was a Gadwall. He needn't be able to rule out the
possibility that there are, somewhere in the world, look-alike grebes that
have migrated to the Midwest in order to know that the bird he saw
was a Gadwall duck. These other possibilities are (whether the birdwatcher realizes it or not) simply too remote.
Most philosophers will dig in their heels here because they realize
that if they don't, they are on the slippery slope to skepticism with

55

nothing left to hang on to. If false rumors about look-alike grebes and
ornithologists can rob an expert bird-watcher of his knowledge that a
bird seen in good light, and under ideal conditions, is a Gadwall duck,
then similarly false rumors, suspicions, or even conjectures about deceptive demons or possible tricks will rob everyone of almost everything
they know. One of the ways to prevent this slide into skepticism is to
acknowledge that although knowledge requires the evidential elimination of all relevant alternatives (to what is known), there is a shifting,
variable set of relevant alternatives. It may be that our bird-watcher does
know the bird is a Gadwall under normal conditions (because look-alike
grebes are not a relevant alternative) but does not know this if there is a
suspicion, however ill founded it may be, that there exist look-alike
grebes within migrating range. This will (or should) be no more unusual
than acknowledging the fact that a refrigerator could truly be described
as empty to a person looking for something to eat but not truly described
as empty to a person looking for spare refrigerator parts. In the first case
"empty" implies having no food in it; in the second it implies having
no shelves, brackets, and hardware in it.
These, then, are some of the advantages to be derived from this
approach to the analysis of knowledge. They are, however, advantages
that can be harvested only if certain questions can be given reasonable
answers: in particular (a) what makes a possibility relevant? (b) If, in
order to know, one must rule out all relevant alternatives, how is this
"elimination" to be understood? What does it take, evidentially, to "rule
out" an alternative? (c) Is it possible, as this type of analysis suggests, for
one to know something at one time and, later, not know it (due to the
introduction of another relevant alternative) without forgetting it? (c)
Can one make it easier to know things by remaining ignorant of what
are, for others, relevant possibilities?
These, and many more questions, need answers if this framework for
the analysis of knowledge is to be anything more than suggestive. Since
I cannot here (or anywhere else, for that matter) provide answers to all
these questions, I will try, in the time remaining, to fill in some of the
large gaps.
Call the Contrasting Set (CS) the class of situations that are necessarily
eliminated by what is known to be the case. That is, if 5 knows that P,
then Q is in the CS (of P) if and only if, given P, necessarily not-Q. In
our bird-watcher's example, the bird's being a Siberian grebe (or any
kind of grebe at all) is in the CS of our bird-watcher's knowledge, or
putative knowledge, that it is a Gadwall duck. So is its being an elephant,

56

a hummingbird, a holographic image, or a figment of his imagination.

Furthermore, let us call the set of possible alternatives that a person must
be in a evidential position to exclude (when he knows that P) the
Relevancy Set (RS). In saying that he must be in a position to exclude
these possibilities I mean that his evidence or justification for thinking
these alternatives are not the case must be good enough to say he knows
they are not the case. Items in the CS that are not in the RS I shall call
irrelevant alternatives. These are items that, although their existence is
incompatible with what is known to be the case, the knower need not
(although he may) have a justification for thinking do not exist. Under
normal conditions (the kinds of conditions that I assume prevail in the
world today) the possibility of something's being a look-alike grebe,
although it is a member of the contrasting set, is not a member of the
RS of a bird-watcher's knowledge that what he sees is a Gadwall duck
(in the kind of circumstances I described).5 On the other hand, its being
an eagle, a mallard, or a loon are members of the RS since if the birdwatcher could not eliminate these possibilities (sufficient unto knowing
that it was not an eagle, a mallard, or a loon) on the basis of the bird's
appearance and behavior, then he would not know that it was a Gadwall.
What we are suggesting here is that the RS is always a proper subset
of the CS and, moreover, may not be the same RS from situation to
situation even though what is known remains the same. The situation
can be diagrammed as follows:
Contrasting Set

.RS
Figure 1

The solid lines indicate an RS and the corresponding piece of evidence that would be required to know with this RS. With a different
RS (RS), indicated by dotted lines, different evidence would be re5 Although there are grebes, and some of them look like ducks, there are (to the best of my
knowledge) no Siberian grebes that look like Gadwall ducks. This part of my story was
pure invention.

57

quired. If Siberian grebes are in the RS, then additional, more elaborate,
evidence is required to know that yonder bird is a Gadwall than in the
normal situation. Since the bellies are of different color, one might, for
example, be able to tell that it was a Gadwall by watching it in flight.
The point, however, is that something more would be needed than was
available in the original, normal situation.
In terms of this kind of diagram, a skeptic could be represented as
one who took RS = CS in all cases. One's evidence must be comprehensive enough to eliminate all contrasting possibilities there being no
irrelevant alternatives.
Once the mistake is made of identifying RS with CS, the pressure
(on non-skeptics) for lowering the standards ofjustification (requisite for
knowing) becomes irresistible. For if in order to know that P one must
be justified in rejecting all members of the CS (not just all members of
the RS), then one can no longer expect very impressive levels of justification for what people know to be the case. If the evidence our birdwatcher has for believing the bird to be a Gadwall duck (wing markings,
etc.) is also supposed to justify the proposition that it is not a look-alike
grebe, then, obviously, the justification is nowhere near conclusive.
What some philosophers seem inclined to conclude from this is that
knowledge does not require conclusive evidence. The reasoning is simple: the bird-watcher knows it is a Gadwall; he doesn't have conclusive
reasons (he can't exclude the possibility that it is a look-alike grebe);
therefore knowledge does not require conclusive reasons. But this, I
submit, is a fallacy, a misunderstanding of what needs to be conclusively
excluded in order to know. Such reasoning is analogous to arguing that
to be empty an object can have a few hundred things in it, and to
conclude this on the basis of the undeniable fact that empty classrooms,
warehouses, and buildings generally have at least a hundred things in
them.
But what determines the membership of an RS? An RS, you will
recall, is a set of situations each member of which contrasts with what is
known to be the case and must be evidentially excluded if one is to
know. Are there criteria for membership in this set? I'm now going to
stick my neck out by saying what some of the considerations are that
determine the membership of these sets. I do not expect much agreement.
(1) The first point has to do with the way we use contrastive focusing
to indicate the range of relevant alternatives. I have discussed this phe-

58

nomenon in another place, so let me give just one example to illustrate

the sort of thing I have in mind.6 Someone claiming to know that Clyde
sold his typewriter to Alex is not (necessarily) claiming the same thing as
one who claims to know that Clyde sold his typewriter to Alex. The
sentence we use to express what they know is the same, of course, but
they reflect, and are designed to reflect, different RSs. A person who
knows that Clyde sold his typewriter to Alex must be able to rule out
the possibility that he gave it to him, or that he loaned it to him, or
(perhaps) that he merely pretended to sell it to him. But he needs only a
nominal justification, if he needs any justification at all, for thinking it
was Alex to whom he sold it. He has to be right about its being Alex, of
course, but he isn't claiming to have any special justification for thinking
it was Alex rather than, say, his twin brother Albert. On the other hand,
the person who knows that Clyde sold his typewriter to Alex is claiming
to know that it wasn't Albert and is, therefore, expected to be in
possession of evidence bearing on the identity of the recipient. But, in
this second case, the knower needs only a nominal justification for the
belief that Clyde sold him the typewriter rather than, say, loaned it to
him. He certainly needn't be able to exclude the possibility that the
entire transaction was a sham designed to fool the IRS.
(2) A second point, related to the first, is the way the subject term
chosen to give verbal expression to what is known often functions to
restrict the range of relevant alternatives.7 Once again, an example will
have to suffice. If I say that I could tell that your sister was amused by
my funny story, I do not thereby claim to know that she is really your
sister, really a human being (rather than a cleverly contrived robot), or
really the sort of creature that could experience amusement. These
possibilities, although certainly relevant to the truth of what I say, in the
sense that if they were realized I would not know what I say I know,
are not possibilities that I need be in an evidential position to exclude to
know that your sister was amused by my joke. I was, as it were, taking it
for granted that she was your sister (hence, a human being, a creature that
could experience amusement), and I was claiming to know something
about the thing so referred to. On the other hand, if I said that I could
tell that the object in the corner (that happened to be your sister) was

6
7

In "Contrastive statements," The Philosophical Review (October 1972).

I tried to describe the way this works with perceptual claims in Seeing and Knowing
(Chicago, 1969), pp. 93-112.

59

amused by my funny story, the possibility that it is a robot becomes a

relevant alternative, one that I am (by this choice of words) accepting
epistemic responsibility for excluding.
(3) Thirdly, in saying that we know we often reveal, either directly
or indirectly, how we know. I could see that the tire was flat, could tell
(by the way they behaved) that they were in love, heard them making
plans to go, learned (from the newspapers) that the auto workers went
out on strike, and used my pocket calculator to get the answer. The way
we come to know, the channel (so to speak) over which we obtain our
information, is, I submit, always the locus of irrelevant alternatives.
Others can challenge the reliability of this channel (our visual system,
our auditory system, the newspapers, the pocket calculator), and if it
turns out unreliable in some way they will thereby have discredited our
claim to knowledge. But others cannot discredit our claim to knowledge
merely by pointing out that the channel over which we received our
information could be unreliable or that we do not know it to be reliable.
Possible malfunctions in the channel over which we receive information
(combined with a resulting false message) are members of the CS but
they are not members of the RS. To say that one can see, by the
newspapers, that the auto workers are going on strike is to advance a
knowledge claim (that the auto workers are going on strike) on the
assumption of the newspapers' reliability. If the newspapers are a reliable
source of such information, then the claimant does know what he says
he knows, and he knows it in the way he says he knows it. One cannot
undermine this claim by raising possibilities about deceptive newspaper
stories or arguing that the claimant does not know that the newspapers,
or this newspaper, is reliable. He never said he did know this. What he
did say is that he knew the auto workers were going out on strike while
simultaneously disclosing what he was taking for granted, which, if true,
allowed him to know this.
I take the same to be true about our sensory systems when we come
to know something by seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching. This is the
function of our frequent indications (when advancing a knowledge
claim) of the manner in which we came to know. We are, by this
device, tipping off our listeners, helping them to identify which possibilities are irrelevant to what we are claiming to know.
(4) Fourthly, some people, I am sure, would insist that a pertinent
factor influencing the size and membership of the RS is the importance
(for the speaker and listeners) of what is known or of someone's know-

60

ing it. There is a difference between driving by a string of gasoline

stations and driving in the middle of the desert. Running out of gas in
the first case may be merely an inconvenience; in the latter case it may
be a matter of life and death. This makes a difference between knowing
(by glancing at your fuel gauge) that you still have some gas in your
tank. The implications of being wrong in these two cases are much
different so different (some would claim) that additional precautions
must be taken (to rule out certain possibilities) in the second case if one
is to know that one still has some gasoline. And there is even a bigger
difference between these cases and knowing that the coolant liquid
surrounding the reactor on Three Mile Island is at a safe level by
glancing at a similar kind of gauge. The fuel gauge (and associated
mechanism) that suffices for knowing that you still have some gasoline
(when driving in the city) is just not good enough for knowing that
there is sufficient liquid coolant surrounding the reactor. This somewhat
paradoxical fact (the fact, namely, that a particular instrument should be
good enough to give knowledge in one place, not good enough in
another) is to be explained, some would say, by the fact that as the stakes
go up, the stakes associated with being right about what one purports to
know, so does the size of the RS. There are more possibilities that must
be eliminated in the nuclear power plant than must be eliminated in the
automobile. In particular, a malfunction in the instrument itself must be
guarded against in the dangerous situation. If it isn't, one doesn't know.
There is, I admit, some appeal to this point, but I think it mistaken.
I see no reason why a standard automobile gauge, transplanted from the
automobile to the nuclear power plant, functioning as the only indicator
of the coolant level, should not, assuming it continues to function
reliably (as reliably as it did in the automobile), be able to do precisely
what the more expensive instruments do viz., tell the operators that
the coolant is at a safe level. I admit that the operators should not rely on
a single gauge, and certainly not one manufactured under such casual
quality control, but if they do rely on it, I don't see any basis for denying
that they know. They should be nervous, but this nervousness is not to
be explained by their failure to know what the coolant level is, but
rather by their uncertainty as to when (due to gauge malfunction) they
stop knowing it.
(5) Finally, we come to the difficult question, the question of when
an alternative (not otherwise excluded as irrelevant by one of the considerations already discussed) is just too remote to qualify as relevant. In the
case of our bird-watcher, some philosophers, thinking to turn the tables

61

on the skeptic (by drastically diminishing the RS), have suggested that
an alternative becomes relevant only when there are positive reasons for
thinking it is, or may be, realized. Doubt can also be irrational, and if
there are no reasons to doubt, mere possibilities are irrelevant to whether
what is believed is known.
This, obviously, is an overreaction. The Wisconsin lakes could be
loaded with migrant Siberian grebes without the bird-watcher's having
any reason to think that such look-alike birds actually existed. His lack
of any reason to doubt, his ignorance of the possibility that what he sees
is a grebe and not a Gadwall, is irrelevant. The mere possibility is in this
case enough to show he doesn't know.
This shows that having a reason (evidence) to think X is a genuine
possibility is not a necessary condition for Xs being a relevant alternative. Perhaps, though, it is sufficient. Perhaps, that is, a reasonable
(justified) belief that yonder bird might be a look-alike grebe (whether
or not this belief is true) is enough to make its being a look-alike grebe
a relevant possibility.
But if a person really does believe that the bird could be a grebe,
aside from the question of whether or not this belief is reasonable, he
surely fails to have the kind of belief requisite to knowing it is a Gadwell.
He certainly doesn't think he knows it is a Gadwall. I do not know
exactly how to express the belief condition on knowledge, but it seems
to me that anyone who believes (reasonably or not) that he might be
wrong fails to meet it.8 And so the present suggestion is irrelevant to our
problem. It describes conditions in which the subject fails to know but
only by robbing him of the belief requisite to knowledge.
It may be thought that the mere presence of evidence that one might
be wrong, assuming this evidence does not affect one's willingness to
believe, is enough to make the respect in which one (according to this
evidence) might be wrong a relevant alternative. This has the unfortunate consequence that one can rob a person, indeed a whole community, of its knowledge by spreading a false rumor. I can, for example,
tell the bird-watcher that I just met an ornithologist looking for migrant
grebes. Once this message is relayed to the bird-watcher, even if he
rejects it as a silly fabrication, he no longer knows that the bird he saw

We needn't suppose that for S to know that P, S must believe that he can't be wrong. But
it does seem reasonable to insist that if S knows that P, he does not believe that he might
be wrong. In other words, if the bird-watcher really believes that the bird he sees might be
a grebe, then he does not know it is a Gadwall.

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was a Gadwall duck. And, as a consequence, the whole community is

robbed of its knowledge that their local pond was visited by a rather
rare bird (a Gadwall duck). The mere fact that I have given them a
reason to think that the bird could be a look-alike grebe,9 whether or
not they accept this as a reason, implies that, lacking evidence that it was
not a grebe, they do not know it was a Gadwall.
Without dragging the dialectic out any longer, let me simply say what
such considerations suggest to me. They suggest that the difference
between a relevant and an irrelevant alternative resides not in what we
happen to regard as a real possibility (whether reasonably or not), but in
the kind of possibilities that actually exist in the objective situation.
Whether or not our bird-watcher knows that the bird he sees is a
Gadwall depends on whether or not, in some objective sense, it could
be a look-alike grebe (or any other similar-looking creature). If, as a
matter of fact, there are no look-alike grebes, that settles the matter. He
knows it is a Gadwall. If there are grebes, but due to certain geographical
barriers they are confined to their Siberian habitat, then, once again, the
possibility of the bird's being a grebe, although remaining a logical
possibility, is not a relevant possibility. They, the grebes, cannot migrate
to the Midwest.
If, however, there are grebes and they can migrate, but just have not
done so, the case becomes more ambiguous. I think, however, that we
now have a genuine possibility, a relevant alternative. By hypothesis the
bird-watcher does not know it is not a migrant grebe, and however
improbable this possibility may be, there is nothing the bird-watcher has
(either in the look of the bird or in general background information)
that excludes the possibility that what he is looking at is a migrant grebe.
He does not, therefore, know it to be a Gadwall. He will, no doubt, say
he knows. And everyone else may agree and, as a result, think they know
(having been told by someone who knows). But the truth lies elsewhere.
It is, I suggest, tantamount to saying that the bottle is empty when there
is a drop left. No one is going to quarrel with this description since all
the relevant implications (e.g., we can't make another martini) are true.
But the claim itself is false.
I assume here that my saying "There is an ornithologist in the area looking for migrant
grebes, a species that looks very much like a Gadwall duck" is prima facie evidence that
there is an ornothologist in the area looking for migrant grebes. If the bird-watcher ignores
me (as we are assuming he does), he nonetheless has been given evidence that the bird he
saw might have been a grebe.

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4
The Epistemology of Belief

Believing is easy, knowing is hard. Believing is easy because it is just a

way of saying something in the internal language of thought. No trick
at all once you have the language. Talk is cheap. The real trick is getting
things right or, even harder, securing some guarantee that one has got
things right. This is knowledge and this is hard.
Such is the conventional contrast between knowledge and belief.
Underlying this contrast is the idea that knowledge, unlike belief, requires special endowments. It takes something more to know because
knowledge requires, besides mere belief, some reliable coordination of
internal belief with external reality, and this coordination, being an
extremely delicate matter, requires the exercise of special skills. If,
though, one takes no thought for whether they are true or false, reliable
or unreliable, then believing itself is mere child's play a form of mental
doodling. Witness the fact that the ignorant believe as effortlessly as the
learned indeed it seems, with far less effort. According to the conventional wisdom, then, the problem, at least for epistemology (but perhaps
not for the philosophy of mind), is not one of understanding how we
manage to have beliefs, but one of understanding the sources and extent
of their reliability.
This picture, I submit, dominates philosophical thinking about
knowledge and belief. It is what keeps epistemology a durable, if not
exactly flourishing, industry. We can thank, or blame, Descartes for
installing it as the centerpiece of philosophical debate about our cogniReprinted from M. D. Roth and G. Ross, eds., Doubting (1990), pp. 183-194, copyright
ca 1990 by Kluwer Academic Publishers, with kind permission from Kluwer Academic
Publishers.

64

tive predicament. I think, though, that this picture distorts the epistemological task by grossly underestimating the cognitive demands of
simple belief. Knowing is hard, but believing is no piece of cake either.
In fact, or so I wish to argue, believing something requires precisely the
same skills involved in knowing. Anyone who believes something thereby
exhibits the cognitive resources for knowing. There is, as we shall see, a
gap between belief and knowledge, but it is not one that provides any
comfort to the philosophical skeptic. If I may, for dramatic effect, overstate my case somewhat, if you can't know it, you can't believe it either.
1. REPRESENTATION AND MISREPRESENTATION

Let me organize my defense of this thesis by discussing representations

in general and, in particular, the representational powers we typically
assign to measuring instruments. I shall return to beliefs, a special kind
of representation, in a moment.
Consider, first, a fairly crude altimeter, a device used for measuring
altitude or height above sea level. It operates basically as a pressure gauge,
responding to changes in air pressure as altitude varies. As the instrument
ascends, the diminished air pressure allows a diaphragm, to which a
pointer is attached, to expand. The expanding diaphragm moves the
pointer across a scale calibrated in feet above sea level.
We can, of course, fool this instrument. We can place it in a chamber
from which air has been pumped. The partial vacuum in the chamber
will cause the instrument to register, say, 35,000 feet when it is, in fact,
only a few hundred feet above sea level. The instrument, it seems,
misrepresents its own altitude. It "says" it is at 35,000 feet when it is
not. If altimeters had beliefs, this surely, would qualify as a false belief.
But have we really fooled the instrument? This depends on what we
take it to be representing or saying. I said earlier that the instrument
misrepresented its own altitude. But why suppose it is altitude that the
instrument represents or, in this case, misrepresents? We, after all, are the
ones who printed "feet above sea level" on the face of the instrument
and called it an "altimeter." We are the ones making it "say" this. The
instrument itself (if I may take its part for the moment) might object to
this way of describing its representational efforts. It is, it might say, a
device for representing pressure, and its representation of the pressure,
even in a vacuum chamber, is perfectly accurate. It is making no mistake.
No one is fooling it. It believes the pressure is 5 pounds per square inch
and the pressure is 5 pounds per square inch. If anyone is making a

65

mistake (the instrument concludes), it is we who assigned it a representational capacity beyond its actual powers. One could as well print
"Gross National Product in Dollars" on its face and then complain that
it misrepresented the state of the national economy.
It seems more reasonable to say that it is the instrument's job to
register the pressure and that it is our job (the job of those who use the
instrument) to see to it that a change in pressure is reliably correlated
with altitude (or whatever other quantity we use the instrument to
measure) to see to it, in other words, that the instrument is used in
conditions in which alterations in pressure carry information about the
magnitudes we use the instrument to measure. If this is so, then the
instrument is discharging its representational responsibilities in a perfectly
satisfactory way. We aren't fooling the instrument; at most we are
fooling ourselves.
Is the speedometer on a car misrepresenting the vehicle's speed if we
jack up the car, engage the gears, and run the engine? The drive shaft
and wheels will turn, and the speedometer will, accordingly, register
(say) 30 mph. The car, of course, is stationary. Something is amiss, and
if we have to place blame, the speedometer is the likely culprit. It is
saying something false. Or is it? How do we decide what the speedometer is saying? Perhaps the speedometer is representing the only thing it
is capable of representing, saying the only thing it knows how to say,
namely, that the wheels are turning at a certain rate. The mistake, if a
mistake is being made here at all, occurs in us, in what we infer must be
true if what the speedometer says is true.
What, then, does a measuring instrument actually represent? Or, to
put it more suggestively, what does the instrument really believe? Does
the altimeter have altitude beliefs or merely pressure beliefs? Does the
speedometer have vehicle-speed beliefs or merely wheel-rotation beliefs?
Until we are in a position to answer these questions we cannot say how,
or even whether, it is possible to "fool" the instrument. We cannot say
whether, in situations like those described earlier the instruments are
misrepresenting anything, whether it is even possible to make them
"believe" something false.
It is time to stop describing instruments in such inappropriate ways.
Although I think it sensible to speak of instruments representing the
quantities they are designed to measure, I do not, of course, think they
say or believe things. We cannot, literally, fool instruments. They don't
make mistakes. I allowed myself to speak this way in order to reveal my
overall strategy. So before moving on to a discussion of creatures to

66

which it does make sense to attribute genuine cognitive states (like belief
and knowledge), let me describe an intermediate case. Some may find it
more realistic, and hence more convincing, than examples involving
speedometers and altimeters.
A frog in its natural habitat will flick with its tongue at small, moving,
dark spots. The neural mechanisms responsible for this response have,
for fairly obvious reasons, been called "bug detectors." In the frog's
natural habitat, all (or most) small, moving, dark spots are bugs, a staple
item in the frog's diet. Psychologists (with presumably better intentions
than I had with the altimeter) have removed frogs from their natural
habitat, projected small, moving, dark shadows on a surface in front of
the frogs, and observed the creatures' response. Not unexpectedly, the
frogs "zap" the moving shadow.
What shall we say about this situation? Has the frog mistakenly
identified the shadow as a bug? Is the frog misrepresenting its surroundings? Does the frog have a false belief, a belief to the effect that this
(small, moving, dark spot) is a bug? Or shall we say that the frog
(assuming for the moment that it has beliefs) does not have "bug" beliefs
at all? Instead what it has are "small-moving-dark-spot" beliefs? Since
the frog usually operates in circumstances (swamps, ponds, etc.) where
small, moving, dark spots are bugs, natural selection has favored the
development of a zapping reflex to whatever the frog perceives as a
small, dark spot. If we take this latter view, then although psychologists
can starve a frog in this artificial environment, they can't fool it. The
frog never makes a mistake because it never represents, or takes things
to be other than they are. It represents the shadow as a small, moving,
dark spot, and this representation is perfectly correct. The frog goes
hungry in this situation, not because it mistakenly sees dark spots as
edible bugs, but because what it correctly sees as moving spots are not,
in fact, edible bugs.
If we adopt this latter strategy in describing what the frog believes,
then it becomes very hard, if not impossible, to fool the animal. If the
frog has beliefs at all, it approaches infallibility in these beliefs. And this
infallibility is achieved in the same way it was (or could be) achieved
with the altimeter and speedometer by tailoring the content of belief
(representation) to whatever properties of the stimulus trigger the relevant
response. If we are willing to be less ambitious in this way about what
we describe the frog as believing, we can be correspondingly more
ambitious in what we describe the frog as knowing.
But there is, surely, a truth of the matter. The frog either believes

67

there is a bug in front of it or it doesn't. It isn't up to us to determine

the content of the frog's beliefs in the way it may be up to us to say
what an altimeter represents.1 Before we create, by fiat, infallible frogs
we had better look to those factors, whatever they are, that determine
the content of a creature's beliefs. Only when we are clear about this
can we proceed to questions about the reliability of these beliefs to
traditional epistemological questions. This, then, brings us to the question of how belief content is determined to the question of learning.
2. LEARNING
Dolphins have an extremely sensitive sonar system that allows them to
detect, and in some cases identify, objects in the water fifty feet away.
They have, for example, been taught to identify cylinders at this distance. The identification occurs whether the cylinders in question are
short and squat or long and narrow, solid or hollow, metal or wood,
red, yellow or blue. Regardless of the object's value along these other
dimensions, the dolphin can distinguish the cylinders from the noncylinders.
If a child of four achieved this level of discrimination, especially if its
distinctive response to cylinders was the utterance of the word "cylinder," we would doubtless credit it (perhaps prematurely) with the concept of a cylinder and, hence, with the capacity for holding beliefs to
the effect that something was a cylinder. There are those, however, who
prefer to be less liberal with dolphins or, indeed, with any creature
lacking a natural language. Since I do not think this issue is particularly
relevant to the point I wish to make with this example, I will continue
to speak of the dolphin as believing of the cylinders it picks out that
they are cylinders.
Suppose, now, that when the dolphin is being taught to identify
cylinders, the trainer uses only cylinders made of plastic. All the noncylinders, the cubes, spheres, pyramids, and so on, are made of some other
material - wood, say. Since the dolphin reaches criterion (as the psychologists say) on plastic objects, responding positively to all and only
plastic objects, can we say that the dolphin has learned to recognize
plastic objects, that it now, when responding positively to X, has a belief
1

Some philosophers, I know, would deny this. I make the assumption, nonetheless, because
(1) I believe it, and (2) it makes my argument that much more difficult and, therefore, that
much more significant if correct.

68

to the effect that X is plastic? Does the dolphin now have some crude
notion of plasticity?
Of course not. The reason we are prepared to credit the dolphin with
the concept of a cylinder (and hence, with beliefs to the effect that this
is a cylinder and that is not) is not just because it distinguishes cylinders
from other shaped objects (for it does, with equal success, distinguish
plastic from nonplastic objects) but because of our conviction that it was
the cylindricality of these objects to which the creature was responding
(and not their plasticity). The animal's sensitive sonar is capable (or so we
believe) of picking up information about the shape of distant objects,
and it was trained to respond in some distinctive way to this piece of
information. There is no reason to think it was picking up, or responding to, information about the chemical constitution of these objects to
the fact that they were plastic. We could test this, of course. Merely
place a wooden cylinder in the pool and observe the animal's response.
A positive response would indicate that it was the cylindricality, not the
plasticity, to which the animal developed a sensitivity. It was, as I prefer
to put it (more about this later), information about the object's shape,
not information about its chemical structure, that guided the animal's
discriminatory behavior during learning. It is this fact that lies behind
our unwillingness to credit the dolphin with the concept plastic and our
willingness (or greater willingness) to credit it with the concept of
cylindricality, even though (given the restricted learning conditions) it
became as successful in distinguishing plastic from nonplastic objects as
it did in distinguishing cylinders from noncylinders. Even if (cosmic
coincidence) all and only cylinders were made of plastic, so that our
trained dolphins could infallibly detect plastic objects (or detect them as
infallibly as they detected cylinders), this would not have the slightest
tendency to make us say that they had acquired the concept of plastic or
could now have beliefs about the plasticity of objects. The level of
sophistication to which we are willing to rise in describing the belief
content of the dolphin is no higher than the kind of information about
objects to which we believe it sensitive. The dolphin can have "cylinder" beliefs but not "plastic" beliefs because, as far as we know anyway,
it has a sensory system that allows it to pick up information about the
shape, but not the chemical structure, of objects at a distance.
It is important to understand what is happening when we make these
judgements, what kinds of considerations shape our decisions about what
level of conceptual sophistication to assign an animal (whether it be a
frog, a dolphin, or a human child). The decision about what concept to

69

assign a creature, and hence the decision about what sorts of beliefs we
may attribute to it, are guided by our assessment of the sort of information the animal utilizes during learning to articulate, develop, and refine
its discriminatory and classificatory repertoire. If we are talking about an
instrument, something that doesn't learn, then its representational
power, what it represents things as being, is a function of the information
to which the instrument is sensitive. Since altimeters are not sensitive to
information about the gross national product, no matter what I happen
to write on the face of the instrument, an altimeter cannot represent or
misrepresent the gross national product. But since the instrument is
sensitive to information about pressure and, some would say, in some
situations at least, to information about altitude, it is capable of both
representing and misrepresenting these magnitudes.
This principle (the principle, namely, that the representational powers
of a system are limited by its informational pickup and processing capabilities) underlies many of our judgments about the conditions in which
someone can and cannot learn. Why can't you teach a normally endowed child her colors in the dark? Because information about the color
of the objects is not therein made available for shaping the child's
discriminatory and identificatory responses. Even if the child succeeds in
picking out all the blue objects (in virtue of the fact, say, that all and
only the blue ones are furry), she will not, by this procedure, learn the
concept blue. She will not believe of the next furry blue object she finds
that it is blue. The most she will believe is that it is furry. Even if we
taught her to say "blue" every time she encountered a blue object in
the dark, we would not, thereby, have given the child a color concept.
We would merely have given her an eccentric way of expressing her
concept of furryness.
The moral of the story is this: to learn what an X is, to acquire the
capacity to represent something as an X (believe it to be an X), it is not
enough to be shown Xs and non-Xs and to distinguish successfully
between them. Unless the information that the Xs are X is made available to the learner (or instrument), and it is this information that is used
to discriminate and classify, the system will not be representing anything
as an X. Even if some concept is acquired, and even if this concept
happens to be coextensive with that of X (thus allowing the subject to
distinguish successfully the Xs from the non-Xs), the concept acquired
will not be that of an X. The subject will not be able to believe of Xs
that they are X. For the concept acquired during learning is determined
by the kind of information to which the learner becomes sensitive, and

70

if no information about the X-ness of objects is made available during

learning (despite the availability of Xs), no such concept can develop.
I have begun to talk more and more about information, so let me
pause a moment to explain what I mean by this way of talking. I mean
nothing very technical or abstract. In fact, I mean pretty much what (I
think) we all mean in talking of some event, signal, or structure carrying
(or embodying) information about another state of affairs. A message
(i.e., some event, stimulus, or signal) carries information about X t o the
extent to which one could learn (come to know) something about X
from the message. And, in particular, the message carries the information
that X is a dingbat, say, if and only if one could learn (come to know)
that X was a dingbat from the message. This does not mean that one
must learn the X is a dingbat from a message that carries this information.
One may not, after all, know the code. The message may be in Chinese.
When I say that one could learn that X was a dingbat from the message I
mean, simply, that the message has whatever reliable connection with
dingbats is required to enable a suitably equipped but otherwise ignorant
receiver to learn from it that X is a dingbat.2
I think it is this sense of the term "information" that is operative in a
wide variety of ordinary contexts, and it is for this reason that I feel safe
in saying that I am using the term as it is commonly used. We say that a
pamphlet contains information about how to probate a will because we
believe that someone could learn something about how to probate a
will by consulting the pamphlet. Information booths are called information booths because the clerks working there either know, or can
quickly find out, about matters of interest to the average patron. One
can come to know by making inquiries at such places. Similarly, when
scientists tell us that the pupil of the eye is a source of information about
another person's feelings and attitudes, that a thunder signature contains
information about the lightning channel that produced it, that the dance
of a honey bee contains information as to the whereabouts of the nectar,
or that the light from a star contains information about the chemical
composition of that body, the scientists are clearly referring to information as something capable of yielding knowledge. And what information
a signal carries is identified with what one could learn from it. This, I
submit, is the very same sense of "information" in which we speak of
books, newspapers, and authorities as containing, or having, information
about a particular topic.
2

I assume here some kind of reliability account of knowledge or justification.

71

This is not intended to be a philosophically illuminating analysis of

information. At least no epistemologist would find it of any special
interest. Rather than telling us anything important about knowledge, it
uses the concept of knowledge to tell us something about information.
But this merely indicates that information is a member of that constellation of epistemic terms that can be interdefined in fairly trivial ways.3
This, though, is unimportant for my present purposes. What is important
is the epistemic character of the concept of information and its connection with knowledge. For if this connection is as I have expressed it,
then the upshot of my argument so far can be expressed as follows: what
concept a person acquires during learning, and hence what beliefs he is
henceforth capable of holding, is restricted to the kind of information
he is capable of picking up and processing. But, in virtue of the connection between information and knowledge, we now see that this is
equivalent to saying that the beliefs a person is capable of holding as a
result of learning are restricted to the sorts of things that that person
(given his information-processing resources) is capable of knowing.
The argument is rather simple, so let me recapitulate. To learn what
a dingbat is, and hence to acquire the conceptual resources necessary for
believing that something is a dingbat, one must be exposed not only to
dingbats, but also to the information that they are dingbats. Not only
must this information be made available, it must be picked up and used
by the learner to guide his discriminatory and identificatory responses if
he is to be credited with the relevant concept. Since this is so, the
learner cannot come to believe something is a dingbat unless he has the
cognitive (i.e., information-processing) resources for knowing something is a dingbat.4 Only someone who can know (or could know the
learner may have lost his capacity for picking up the required information) that this is a dingbat can believe it to be a dingbat.
It should be emphasized that this is a thesis about the relationship
between what is believed and what is, or can be, known, not a thesis

Although they can be interdefined in fairly trivial ways, they needn't be. In Knowledge and
the Flow of Information (Bradford/MIT, 1981), I give an independent (of knowledge) analysis
of information, thus making the concept available for the analysis of knowledge.
Obviously one can believe something is a dingbat when it is not a dingbat - hence, believe
things that cannot be known (because they are not the case). I hope it is clear from the
wording in the text that I am not denying this obvious fact. The thesis is, rather, that if
one has the concept of a dingbat (hence, capable of holding beliefs to the effect that
something is a dingbat), then that something is a dingbat is the sort of thing one can know.

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about what, if anything, can be known or believed. The thesis is, in

other words, quite independent of one's views about what if anything,
dolphins, frogs, or people can know (or believe) to be the case. I have
not said that frogs can (in their natural habitat) know when a bug flies
by. Nor have I denied this (e.g., by saying that they could only know
that there was a small, dark spot moving by). And for purposes of this
essay, I don't particularly care what a dolphin can know, or believe,
about a cylinder immersed in its pool fifty feet away. I have my own
ideas about these matters, but they are not relevant to the thesis I am
presently defending. What I am arguing is that whatever view you take
about what a creature can believe, you thereby commit yourself to a
certain level of sophistication in the creature's capacity for picking up
and processing information; if it can't pick up information about bugs,
then it cannot hold beliefs about bugs (just as the altimeter that can't
pick up information about the gross national product cannot represent
the quantity). So if the frog does believe that there is a bug in front of
it, then it is the sort of creature capable of picking up, processing, and
responding to information that there is a bug in front of it. It is this
conditional thesis for which I have been arguing. When we combine
this conditional with what has been said about information, we reach
the conclusion that anything the frog believes is the sort of thing it is
(was5) capable of knowing.

3. LANGUAGE AND BELIEF

With appropriate modifications, the same can be said about our own
conceptual situation: the conditions that must obtain for the acquisition
of simple concepts are the same conditions that make possible the knowledge that these concepts apply. In our own case, though, the possibilities
for confusion about this matter are much greater. For we not only
believe things, we say things, and we sometimes say things we don't
believe. That is, unlike the altimeter, frog, and dolphin, we have dual
representational systems and they are not always synchronized. It is,

The temporal qualifier should always be understood. A creature may have acquired a
concept at a time when he possessed a fully functional sensory system, one capable of
picking up and processing information of a certain kind. Once the concept is acquired,
though, the creature may have lost the information-processing capacity (e.g., have gone
blind), hence losing the capacity to know what he can still believe.

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therefore, easy enough to attribute to the one representational resources

of the other thus blurring the intimate relationship between belief and
(the capacity for) knowledge.
Let me illustrate the problem in a simpleminded way. We will turn
to a more interesting case in a moment. If I teach a child her colors and
have her say "circular" whenever a blue object is presented, what will
this show (assuming the child learns her lesson) about what the child
believes or about what kinds of mistakes she is capable of making?
Clearly, when the child looks at a blue cube and says "circular" she will
be misrepresenting, linguistically misrepresenting, the properties of what
she is talking about.6 This, though, isn't very interesting. It certainly isn't
a symptom of any cognitive or conceptual misrepresentation. The child says,
"This is circular," but she believes it is blue. Through an unfortunate
piece of education, she does not use the correct word to express what
she believes. What she means by "circular" is blue. What we have done
with this child is similar to what earlier we suggested doing with the
altimeter: printing "Gross National Product in Dollars" on its face. In
doing this we can make the instrument "say" that the gross national
product is increasing, but we have given it a way of "saying" things it
does not, indeed cannot, believe. And so it is with the child. The child's
(linguistic) responses have a meaning that exceeds her (internal) powers
of representation.
Something like this happens when children first learn to talk. The
toddler who delights his mother by saying "Mommy" whenever she
appears disappoints her when he says the same thing to his Aunt Mildred.
When the child is corrected ("No, Jimmy, I'm Mommy, that's Aunt
Mildred"), what is this a correction of? A false belief? But does Jimmy
really believe that this other woman is his mother? Probably not. It
seems more likely that the child simply believes Aunt Mildred is a
woman, or a person, precisely what he believed of his mother when he
called her "Mommy," and that he is using the word "Mommy" to
express this less determinate notion. Correction here is not the weeding
out of false beliefs, but the development of more discriminating set of

I earlier (circa second draft) thought that what the child said when it said "This is circular"
was false. I thought this because it seemed to me that what the child was saying (with these
words) was that the object was circular. Jon Barwise convinced me that this was not so.
What the child is saying when it uses these words is that the object is blue. Hence, what
the child is saying is true.

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concepts and the correlative ability to express these more determinate

concepts in linguistically appropriate ways.
Since, for most of us, the acquisition of our natural language goes
hand in hand with the acquisition of the concepts to which this language
gives expression, the ability to represent something verbally is developed
in close association with the ability to represent something in the internal
language of thought. Some philosophers prefer to say that these two
abilities are not really distinct. That may or may not be so. I don't wish
to take sides on this issue here. What is important for present purposes
is the understanding that during learning our linguistic responses to
stimuli have a meaning independent of whatever representational capacity the learner himself may have developed. Since this is so, the verbal
mistakes that occur in classifying and identifying objects need not reflect
a mismatch between the world and the respondent's inner representation
of the world. The only mismatch may be between the world and the
respondent's external (verbal) representation of the world.
This point is, I think, easy enough to accept when we are dealing
with obvious examples like those described earlier. There are, however,
profound implications for epistemology. Perhaps the best way to exhibit
these implications is by another, less obvious, example.
Hilary Putnam has described a place, Twin Earth, in which there are
two substances, H 2 O and XYZ, chemically different but both having
the superficial properties of water.7 By "superficial" I mean the properties we (Earthlings) rely on (outside the laboratory) to identify something
as water: taste, smell, feel, capacity for quenching thirst, and so on. Some
of the lakes and rivers on Twin Earth are filled with H 2 O; others are
filled with XYZ (here I depart from Putnam's example). It rains H 2 O in
some parts of the country, XYZ in other parts. Twin Earthlings call
both substances "water" since the liquids are (apart from elaborate
chemical analysis, an analysis that they haven't yet perfected) indistinguishable.
Consider, now, a Twin Earthling (call him Tommy) being taught
what water (or what the Twin Earthlings call "water") is on a part of
Twin Earth in which there is both H 2 O and XYZ. As it turns out, quite
by accident, Tommy learns what water is by being exposed only to
7

"The Meaning of 'Meaning' " in Language, Mind and Knowledge, Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, 7, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1975); reprinted in
Mind, Language and Reality - Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, Cambridge, England (1975).

75

H 2 O (it only happened to rain H 2 O on the days he was outside, no

XYZ ever happened to come out of his faucets at home, etc.). After
learning what water is to the complete satisfaction of his parents, friends,
and teachers, Tommy is miraculously transported to Earth where there
is to be found only H 2 O (XYZ cannot exist in the Earth's atmosphere).
Since there are no other difference between Twin Earth and Earth,
Tommy blends in without trouble. Everything Tommy says about water
(using the word "water") will correspond to what his Earthling friends
say and believe about water (also using the word "water").
As you may have expected, the question, once again, is not what
Tommy says, but what Tommy believes. Tommy, I submit, does not
have the same concept as his Earthling associates. Therefore, what
Tommy believes when he says "This is water" is not what his Earthling
friends believe when they say "This is water." What Tommy means by
"water" is either H 2 O or XYZ. This, of course, is how we (knowing all
the facts of the case) would describe it, not Tommy. If asked, Tommy
will say that he means water by "water" and he surely does mean this.
But the point is that more things qualify as water for Tommy than for
the Earthlings. If we should reverse the scenario and imagine an Earthling miraculously transported back to Twin Earth with Tommy,
Tommy's belief of a puddle of XYZ that it was water (i.e., an instance
of the concept he expresses with the word "water") would be true,
while his Earthling friend's belief would be false. Since this is so, they
must be expressing different beliefs with the words "This is water."
Putnam takes this result as showing that meanings are not in the head.
Tommy and his Earthling friends can be identical in all relevant respects;
yet, they have different concepts, different beliefs, different meanings.
My intuitions (about this example) agree with Putnam's, but the moral
I want to draw from this story goes beyond, and in some ways contrary
to, 8 the moral Putnam draws from it. I think this example neatly illustrates a principle expressed earlier, the principle, namely, that a system's
representational capabilities are determined by its information-handling
resources. Or, to give a more restricted (not to mention cruder) expression of the principle, an individual can believe (and, in this sense,
"Contrary to" because the conclusion I draw from this example (as embellished) is that the
extension of a concept (like "water") is not determined by causal factors. The same things
(e.g., H2O) caused Tommy to use the word "water" during learning as caused his Earthling
associates to use this word during learning. What determines the extension (and, hence,
the concept) are not facts about causal relations, but facts about the kind of information
available during learning. Information and causation are related but only indirectly.

76

represent) only what he has the information-handling resources of

knowing.
The difference between Tommy and his Earthling friends is to be
found in the difference in the kind of information to which they were
made responsive during the learning period when they acquired their
respective concepts. Given the situation on Twin Earth, Tommy, although repeatedly exposed to H 2 O (and never XYZ), was never exposed to the information that the liquid he saw was H 2 O. All he ever
received, processed, and responded to was a piece of disjunctive information, the information, namely, that the liquid was either H 2 O or XYZ.
This is all the information Tommy got because, on Twin Earth, this is
all that one could learn about the character of the Hquid from ordinary
sensory transactions with it. Since it was this piece of information that
was used to shape Tommy's discriminatory and identificatory responses,
this is the concept he acquired and this is the kind of belief he subsequently has about the liquids he describes as water.
Since XYZ cannot be found on Earth (and this is no mere accident
but a law of nature), Earthlings acquire a different concept because their
discriminatory responses are shaped by a different piece of information:
the information that the liquid is H 2 O. 9 Since the lawful regularities
prevailing in these two worlds are different, the kind of information to
be found in physically indistinguishable signals is also different. Hence,
the concepts developed in response to these physically indistinguishable
signals are also different. This is why Tommy and his Earthling friends,
although they say the same thing, although they were exposed to exactly
the same liquids during learning (viz., H 2 O), and although they developed their ideas in exactly the same way, have quite different beliefs
about the liquid they see and describe.
The important point to notice about this example is how the concepts one develops, and hence the sorts of beliefs one is thereby capable
of holding, neatly reflect one's epistemological strengths and limitations.
There is, as it were, an epistemological preestablished harmony. We
(Earthlings) have a more determinate concept than Tommy, a concept
that, if he possessed it on Twin Earth, he would be incapable of knowing
I here assume that it is a law on Earth (but not, of course, on Twin Earth) that anything
exhibiting the normal sensible properties of water is H 2 O. If this is too strong, then I
assume that on Earth (but not, of course, on Twin Earth) one can come to know that
something is H 2 O by looking, tasting, smelling, etc. It is this fact that supports my claim
(in the text) that on Earth (but not on Twin Earth) the ordinary sensory stimulation
associated with our perception of water carries the, information that it is water (H2O).

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(by ordinary sensory means) whether it ever, in fact, applied to the

liquid running out of his faucet. Given the widespread prevalence of
XYZ, Tommy would make frequent mistakes. He would, in other
words, have a real epistemological problem if he had our concept of water.10
But he doesn't have our concept of water and, given that he learns in
roughly the way we learn what water is, there is no way for him to get
it. The concept he does acquire (a concept the extension of which I am
expressing as "either H 2 O or XYZ") is a concept that he is cognitively
prepared to apply to his surroundings. He can know that the liquid
coming out of his faucet is what he means by "water."
To put the point in its most general form: if someone lives in a place
where it is impossible to distinguish A-type things from B-type things,
hence impossible to know that this particular thing is an A (or a ), then
it is likewise impossible, under ordinary learning conditions, to develop
a way of representing something as an A (or as a B). The most that will
be developed is a way of representing something as ^4-or-B. And in this
case we needn't worry about mistaking an A for a B (or vice versa) since
we can never take anything as an A or as a B.
4. CONCLUSIONS AND QUALIFICATIONS
I have been arguing for a perfectly general thesis, and I am afraid that it
cannot be defended in its most general form. There are exceptions that
I have suppressed for expository purposes. So, before trying to state the
upshot of this argument, let me briefly describe the qualification that is
essential.
My thesis is meant to apply to simple or primitive concepts (representational structures), concepts that are not themselves composed of simpler conceptual elements (representational structures). In arguing that
the possession of the concept X requires the possessor to have the
resources for picking up, processing, and responding to the information
that something is X, the argument works only for simple, ostensively
learned concepts. I do not wish to argue that we cannot manufacture out
of a corpus of simple concepts, and the appropriate syntactical machinery, complex concepts for the application of which we lack the requisite

10 As I understand the Causal Theory (of natural kind terms), Tommy would (according to
this theory) have our concept of water since, by hypothesis, H 2 O figured causally (just as
it did for Earthlings) in his acquisition of this concept. This, I think, shows what is wrong
with a causal theory.

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information-processing capabilities. That is, there are obviously beliefs

involving complex concepts (e.g., the belief that Xis a miracle, that Yis
a random sequence, or that there are no unicorns) that we lack the
cognitive resources for knowing to be true. And it certainly seems that
with linguistically sophisticated creatures such as ourselves, these complex concepts will be commonplace. But there can be no complex
concepts without simple concepts, and it is to these latter primitive
representational structures that the thesis of this essay is meant to apply.
The upshot, then, of this essay is that no matter how we choose to
describe the conceptual sophistication of an agent, whether it be a frog,
a dolphin, a computer, or a human being, we are committed to that
agent's having the cognitive resources for knowing how things stand with
respect to the situation being represented - at least with regard to the
agent's primitive concepts. This, I think, completely turns the tables on
the skeptic. The traditional arguments that we cannot know what we
purport to know because we lack the appropriate cognitive endowments, because the information on which we rely is always equivocal or
ambiguous in some fundamental respect, are arguments that, if successful
in relation to simple concepts, show not that we cannot know what we
believe, but that we do not believe what we think we believe.11 If the
information we receive about Xs is always too impoverished to specify
an X as an X, then, admittedly, we have an epistemological problem
about how we can ever know that there are Xs. But we also have a
problem about how we can ever believe that there are Xs.

11 If the reader thinks it could not show this (viz., that we do not believe what we think we
believe), so much the worse for the view that we could entertain (simple) beliefs that we
could not know to be true.

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Two Conceptions of Knowledge:

Rational vs. Reliable Belief

There are two ways to think about knowledge. One way is to start, so
to speak, at the bottom. With animals. The idea is to isolate knowledge
in a pure form, where its essential nature is not obscured by irrelevant
details. Cats can see. Dogs know things. Fido remembers where he
buried his bone. That is why he is digging near the bush. Kitty knows
where the mouse ran. That is why she waits patiently in front of the
hole. If animals are not conceptually sophisticated, do not posses language, do not understand what it takes to know, then this merely shows
that such talents are not needed to know.
If, then, pursuing this strategy, you want to find out what knowledge
is, look at what Fido has when he sees where his food bowl is or
remembers where he buried his bone. Think about Kitty as she stalks a
bird or pursues a mouse. And this, whatever it is, is exactly what we've
got when we know that the universe is over ten billion years old and
that water is the ash of hydrogen. It is true that in its grander manifestations (in science, for example) knowledge may appear to be totally
beyond Fido's and Kitty's modest capacities, but this is simply a confusion of what is known (recondite and well beyond their grasp) with
knowledge itself something they have (albeit about more humble
topics) in great profusion.
This, as I say, is one way of thinking about knowledge. Call it the
bottom-up strategy. It appeals to those philosophers who seek some naturalistic basis for epistemological theory, some way of integrating philosophical questions about knowledge, perception, and memory with
Reprinted from Grazer Philosophiche Studien 4 (1991), 1530, by permission of the publisher.

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scientific concerns about the psychological and biological mechanisms

for implementing our cognitive transactions with the world. From a
bottom-up point of view, knowledge is an early arrival on the evolutionary scene. It is what animals need in order to coordinate their
behavior with the environmental conditions on which their survival and
well-being depend.
There is, however, another strategy, something I will call a top-down
approach to understanding cognitive phenomena. It takes its point of
departure from Descartes, from traditional worries about skepticism,
from the normative considerations that dictate proper methods of inquiry and appropriate standards for belief. White-frocked scientists, not
furry pets, are the exemplars, the models, the ideal. Patient and objective
inquiry, supported by observation, testing, and experiment, leading (if
one is lucky) to confirmation of one hypothesis over its rivals that, and
not brute perception, is the yardstick to be used in taking the measure
of knowledge. Knowledge is what you get when you conduct inquiry,
and fix belief, in that way. The rest is, at best, true opinion or an inferior
grade of knowledge.
According to this second, top-down, strategy, knowledge is the result
of an assessment and evaluation procedure in which conclusions are
reached from premises in conformity with rules that are, if not justified,
then rationally justifiable. The whole process need not, in every instance
(perhaps not even in most instances), take place in a conscious, deliberate
way. It may sometimes occur automatically (when the requisite inferences become habitual) or at a level where the evidential connections
are used in some unconscious way in arriving at, say, perceptual judgments.1 Nonetheless, whether conscious or not, it is the justificational
relations embedded in this inferential structure that determine the epistemic merit of any judgment emerging from that structure. Conscious,
critical, rational inference is the ideal; it sets the standard. A belief is
justified, and it constitutes knowledge, only insofar as the process by
means of which it is reached conforms to canons of scientific inference
and rational theory choice.
I call this a top-down strategy for obvious reasons: Einstein, not Fido,
1

I am thinking here of "problem-solving" approaches to visual perception associated with

Helmholtz and, more recently, Richard Gregory. According to Gregory, for instance, the
visual system evaluates incoming data (generally impoverished) and arrives at the best
"hypothesis" about distal conditions. Such inferences, of course, occur at an unconscious
level. One sees the bowl, but seeing it consists in the visual system reaching a conclusion,
via an inference, and generally from ambiguous data, that there is a bowl.

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is the model. If animals and infants know anything, it is only because

we charitably adopt toward them (as we do with some machines) a
"cognitive stance": we say (with an indulgent wink) that they know,
remember, and see things, yes, but we do so in a figurative way. In
central cases and it is with the central cases that epistemology has been
(or should be) concerned we reserve knowledge for those with the
capacity to reason and evaluate their epistemic situation, for those who
understand what it takes to know and have grounds for thinking they
have what it takes.
The recent controversy between internalists and externalists (on the
analysis of knowledge) is, I think, an instance of this more general
strategic difference. Externalists, those who think knowledge is a matter
of getting yourself connected to the facts in the right way (causally,
informationally, etc.), whether or not you know or understand that you
are so connected, tend to be bottom-uppers. Fido is (through normal
eyesight) connected in the right way to his food bowl; hence, he can
see (hence, knows) that the bowl is there, next to the table. Internalists,
on the other hand, those who require for knowledge some justificatory
structure in an agent's beliefs, tend to be top-downers. It isn't enough
to be tracking (Nozick's term for being properly connected to) the facts.
One must also know, be justified in believing, have reason to think, one
is tracking the facts. We require not just information, but information
that that is what we are getting. Fido may be tracking the location of his
bowl, but if he has no internal understanding of this fact, no capacity for
evaluating the quality of information on which he relies to find the
bowl, then he does not know where his bowl is in any important or
epistemologically relevant sense.
I am a bottom-upper. Keith Lehrer is a top-downer. 2 I don't know
where he went wrong. It could have been his move, many years ago,
from the North's bracing externalism (you don't need reasons to know it
is cold in Minnesota) to the internalist smog of Providence, Rhode
2 Maybe top-middler would be a better word to describe some of Keith's more recent
compromising efforts between externalism and internalism (if calling both views false can
be called a compromise). See Lehrer 1988, pp. 329-330; 1990, p. 15; and 1989, pp. 131132, 147, for his "doxastic reliabilism" and the "monster theory." Although Keith concedes
the necessity of some "external" condition on knowledge (beyond that of truth, which, as
he notes, 1989, p. 132, is an externalist requirement that almost everyone accepts), his
insistence that there be an "internal" (i.e., subjective) rational acceptance of the satisfaction
of this condition, his insistence that one needs the information that one is getting information, makes him a top-downer (an internalist) in my classification scheme. As he says (1989,
p. 131), coherence remains, for him, the central notion in epistemology.

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Island. But wherever it was he picked up the internalist virus, it has been
with him for at least thirty years. He now exhibits unmistakable symptoms of terminal top-downism. I don't expect treatment especially
from a bottom-upper like myself to help much now. He's probably
got the bug for life. Nonetheless, I would like to try poking around
with a sharp (or as sharp as I can make it) instrument. Even if I don't
succeed in curing the patient (and, realistically, I do not even expect to
penetrate the skin), maybe I can provoke some responsive groans.
To begin with, it won't do (on the part of either side) to say that
there are different, or perhaps many, senses of the verb "to know" and
that the bottom-uppers (or top-downers, take your pick) are preoccupied with an irrelevant, an unimportant, a not-epistemologically central, or a not very interesting (or not very interesting to us) notion of
what it means to know. This may well be true, but one can't just
declare it, pick up one's toys (the interesting-to-me sense of knowledge),
and go home to play by oneself. Lehrer, at times, threatens to do this.
In dismissing the kind of knowledge that animals, young children, and
brain-damaged adults have exactly the sort of cases that bottom-uppers
think are of central importance for understanding knowledge Lehrer,
for instance, says (repeatedly) that this is not the sort of knowledge that
concerns him. These senses of the word do not, he says, capture the
sense of knowledge that is characteristically human, that distinguishes
us from other beings. "I am concerned," he says, "with knowledge
that a being could in principle and with training articulate" (1988,
pp. 330-331).
The question, of course, is whether there is a sense of knowledge that
distinguishes us from inarticulate beings. Is there a sense of "hunger" or
"thirst" that distinguishes us from animals and young children, who
cannot say they are hungry or articulate what it is like to be thirsty? If we
are inclined to think (as I assume most of us do) that animals and infants,
although quite unable to articulate it, can be thirsty in pretty much the
same way we are thirsty, what is wrong with supposing that Fido's got
exactly what we've got knowledge but he can't express it the way
we can? Fido knows his food bowl is over there by the table and I know
his food bowl is over there by the table, and we both know this in
pretty much the same way we both see that it's there. I, to be sure,
differ from Fido in many interesting ways. I can say not only what I
know (that the bowl is over there), but that I know. He can't. I have a
reasonable grasp of what it takes to know; he doesn't. I have read
Edmund Gettier; he can't. On demand, I might even be able to concoct

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a pretty good argument (starting from premises about how things seem
to me) that the bowl is over there by the table something that is quite
beyond Fido's feeble abilities. But why is any of this relevant to whether
Fido knows exactly what I know that the bowl is by the table and
knows it, furthermore, in exactly the way I know it, by seeing? If Lehrer
is, for whatever reasons, more interested in studying the cognitive exploits of articulate and reasonably intelligent human beings, more concerned with what constitutes "critical reasoning" (1990, p. 36), well and
good. Let him do so. If he wants to study the talents and capacities that
make possible our most cherished scientific achievements, the discovery
of the double helix, for instance, and our most worthy practical attainments, the development of a system of justice, for example (1990, p. 5),
he has every right to do so. But why suppose that what distinguishes us
from Fido including the great many things we know that Fido cannot
know - is relevant to whether Fido knows anything at all and knows it,
furthermore, in the same sense in which we know things? Superior
intellectual accomplishments, our capacity to engage in critical discussion
and rational confrontation (1990, p. 88), are certainly not relevant to
whether Fido eats, sleeps, and defecates in exactly the same sense we do.
Why, then, suppose it relevant to whether Fido can see, know, and
remember in the same sense we do? One cannot simply assume that
these are different senses without begging the key issue separating internalists and externalists.
One can, if one likes, study the way astrophysicists differ from ordinary mortals in their knowledge of processes occurring in distant stars,
but it would be a great mistake to think that just because what they
know, and their ways of knowing it, are beyond the intellectual capacities of ten-year-old children, the feeble-minded, and chimpanzees, that,
therefore, astrophysicists know things in a sense of the word "knowledge" that is different from that applied to ten-year-old children, the
feeble-minded, and chimpanzees.
Even if we should suppose, with Lehrer, that there is some special
sense of knowledge that we have that Fido lacks, a sense that requires
not just having received the relevant information (which Fido receives
too), but an appreciation, understanding, or justification (that Fido presumably lacks) that one has received such information, an ability to
"defend" a claim that one knows (which Fido obviously lacks), we can
still ask whether this is an epistemologically interesting, useful, or common notion, one that we actually use in our everyday descriptions of

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epistemic phenomena. When I say that my neighbor recognized the bird

as a Roufus hummingbird, am I crediting her with good old everyday
knowledge or am I crediting her with advanced or metaknowledge (Lehrer's
term for the kind of knowledge he is interested in, the kind that Fido
can't have; 1988, p. 331)? If she knows it's a Roufus hummingbird but
does not metaknow it, doesn't know it in Lehrer's advanced way, who
cares? We could choose to talk about advanced thirst and metahunger
(the sort of hunger and thirst that only very smart people can feel), but
what would this show about whether Fido, children, and brain-damaged
adults were ever hungry? Maybe the gourmand means something special
when he speaks about being hungry for a good meal, a sense of "being
hungry" that Fido never experiences, but this doesn't mean that Fido is
never hungry in that more common sense of hunger that characterizes
most of our talk about human hunger. Maybe Keith Lehrer is a cognitive
gourmet. Maybe advanced knowledge and metaknowledge are cognitive
delicacies, served exclusively in the academic classroom (the recipes for
which appear exclusively in books on epistemology).3 The real cognitive
issues, the ones we all care about, though, concern good old meat-andpotatoes knowledge.4
So let us not beg the question by declaring, at the outset, that we are
interested in a special sense of the verb "to know" or in a special kind
of knowledge. Barring convincing grounds for thinking otherwise, we
should begin by assuming that people intend to be attributing pretty
much the same sort of thing to scientists, babies, chimpanzees, and
spiders when they describe them as seeing, knowing, sensing, recognizing, distinguishing, hearing, and remembering things. Perhaps we can
agree to draw the line before we reach instruments and machines.
Although we often speak of artifacts in cognitive terms as sensing,
remembering, knowing, and recognizing things there are (as there are
not with many animals) reasons to treat such descriptions as figurative or
metaphorical. After all, machines are inanimate objects; they don't have
beliefs and thoughts, the sorts of internal, subjective attitudes that are
3 Which seems to be the opinion of my undergraduate students.
4 Likewise, it is, I think, too simple to dodge skepticism by multiplying senses of "know" conceding "know for certain" to the skeptic and keeping "know" for our practical
everyday selves (see Lehrer 1990, pp. 178-179). This, once again, seems to be the tactic of
letting everyone have his own toy to play with: the skeptic gets his toy, certain knowledge,
and we keep our toy, knowledge. Everybody is happy, and we get to keep talking the way
we always talked.

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typically taken to be part of what is involved in knowledge.5 Perhaps

spiders and bacteria very primitive organisms do not have beliefs
either. If so, then they, too, should be classified with the artifacts as
knowing, seeing, and remembering only in a special, figurative sense of
these words.6 But unless someone has reasons to think that small children, mental defectives, and chimpanzees don't even have beliefs (or
whatever subjective state we take to be constitutive of knowledge), we
do not have the same reasons to treat our attributions of knowledge to
them as in any way special or metaphorical.7 I am willing to concede, in
other words, that insofar as there are reasons to think that organism O
does not (or cannot) have beliefs, or does not (or cannot) have beliefs of
type T, then there are reasons for thinking that O does not (cannot)
know, or does not (cannot) know, things of type T. This, in fact, is why
I think machines do not have knowledge. They do not have beliefs.
This, in fact, is why I think animals do not (indeed, cannot) know such
things as that there are more real numbers than rational numbers or that
Fido will be eight years old next Monday. They cannot have beliefs of
this sort. Having certain beliefs requires having appropriate concepts,
and it is hard to see how animals, lacking a language, could have the
more technical ones. That is why Fido and Kitty cannot know many of
the things we know; they do not even have the conceptual resources for
understanding them. This, though, tells us something about the conceptual limits of animals. Unless, however, we are prepared to argue that
animals (young children, brain-damaged adults, and so on) have no

5 Although this may be disputed in certain circles (e.g., artificial intelligence and cognitive
science), I assume it here since it is common ground between top-downers and bottomuppers: both externalists and internalists require, minimally, something like belief on the
part of the knower. Lehrer requires more than this minimum, but more of this in a
moment.
6 I leave aside the attribution of skills and talents (knowing how) since these, even for the
most primitive organisms, are (I assume) quite literal. Minnows know how to swim and
spiders know how to spin a web. We are here concerned with factual knowledge, knowledge in what Lehrer (1990, pp. 34) calls the informational sense (although, of course, I
reject his claim that knowledge in this sense requires one to recognize something as information
(p. 3).
7 Lehrer, of course, has a more demanding condition on knowledge than simple belief. He
describes this as acceptance, and what he means by acceptance is pretty fancy, a mental state
that Fido and Kitty (however able they might be to have beliefs) cannot have (1990,
pp. 113E). He may be right in imposing this stronger condition, of course, but we cannot,
at this stage of the argument, accept this stronger condition. To do so would beg the
question against the bottom-uppers since animals, infants, and the feeble-minded (braindamaged) cannot (in Lehrer's sense) accept anything.

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beliefs at all, it does not tell us anything about knowledge itself, about
whether they know, or can know, the things they do have beliefs about.
The question we are asking, or should be asking, is not whether Fido
believes anything at all,8 but whether, assuming there are things Fido
believes, which (if any) of these beliefs qualify as knowledge. And why?
If he can think his food bowl is over there by the table, why can't Fido
know it and know it, moreover, in exactly the same sense in which I
know it?
Lehrer has made it quite clear what it is he thinks animals (very young
children, brain-damaged adults) lack that disqualify them as knowers.
He does not challenge them as believers. A two-year-old child, a dog,
and a mentally retarded adult can (for some suitable values of P) think P.
What they cannot do, for any value of P, however, is know P. The
reason they cannot is that although they can get the information needed
to know, and although this information may cause them to believe P,
they do not have the information that it is information (1990, pp. 162164).9 They are ". . . unable to discern the difference between correct
information and misinformation or even understand the distinction between truth and deception" (1988, pp. 332333). They lack the concept
of veracity (1990, pp. 8-9). They lack resources that we possess, the
capacity for knowing or telling that what they are receiving is genuine
information (1990, pp. 162164). For all these reasons they fail to know
the things they believe.
If we accept these conditions on knowledge, it means that although
poor Fido can get (and use) information information he clearly needs
to find his food bowl, to avoid obstacles as he moves about the house,
and to get the stick he is told to fetch he has no way of knowing any
of this. Fido does not know where his food bowl is (although he always
finds it when he is hungry), never knows where the sticks are he is told
to fetch (although he always brings them back), and cannot know where
the doorway is (although he always manages to walk through it and not
I assume here that the disagreement between the top-downers and the bottom-uppers,
between internalists and externalists, is not over the question of whether animals can think.
That strikes me as an issue in the philosophy of mind that is seldom, if ever, broached (or
argued for) in the epistemological literature. Until we have convincing grounds for thinking
otherwise, then, I will assume that animals have beliefs (although what beliefs they have
may be difficult to say). If they do not know anything, it is for some other reason.
If the information (that P) is not good enough (without the information that it is information) to know P, one wonders what good the information that it is information is without
the added (3rd level) information that this (2nd level) information (about the 1st level
information) is information.

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into the adjacent walls). Since he cannot know these things, it follows
that, despite having good eyesight, he cannot (ever!) see where his bowl
is, where the sticks (that he fetches) are, or where the doorway is.10
To my ear, as (I assume) to most ears, all of this sounds most implausible. In fact, it sounds downright false. Obviously Fido can see where
his food bowl is. Of course these children, even very young children,
can see where things are their toys and dolls, for instance. Only a
philosopher in the grip of theory would think to deny it. If a theory of
knowledge has, as one of its consequences, that animals and children
cannot see where anything is, then it is time to get a new theory.
It is, furthermore, too early to drag in a distinction to rescue the
theory. Too early to insist that. . . well, yes, Fido can see (hence, know)
where his bowl is, or a child can see where her toys are, in some sense
of see (and know), but not in the sense of see (and know) that is
philosophically important, relevant, or interesting (they don't have advanced knowledge or metaknowledge of such things). As I indicated earlier,
if, at this stage of the proceedings, this is to be anything but a questionbegging and ad hoc rescue of an internalist theory, we need an argument
- not just a bald claim - that such distinctions (between senses of
"know") actually exist. For the same reason it is also question-begging
(if not blatantly false) to classify such examples as "borderline" and,
hence, not to be used against internalist theories. There is nothing
borderline about these examples not unless one has already made up
one's mind about what is to count as knowledge.11
Bottom-uppers like myself prefer examples like the ones just given,
examples involving sense perception, because it is here that justification,
inference, reasoning, and evidence (the sorts of things that top-downers
think important) seem least relevant seem, in fact, totally irrelevant.
We know it, just as Fido knows it, because we can see it. We don't
have to reason about it, think about it, have a justification for believing
it. The justification if, indeed, this kind of talk even makes sense in
this context lies in the seeing. As J. L. Austin was fond of pointing
10 It follows on two assumptions: (1) If one sees where X is, then one sees that X is there for
some value of "there" (e.g., under the sofa, in the closet), and (2) if one sees that X is
there, one knows that X is there. Both assumptions strike me as obvious.
11 Lehrer comes close to suggesting that he can classify anything he likes as borderline (and,
hence, ineligible as a counterexample against him) because (1990, p. 32) the reasons for
his classification are "theoretical." Unless I miss something, this is a way of saying that his
theory will decide which examples are relevant to testing his theory. A nice arrangement.

out, when things are in front of your nose, you don't need evidence for
thinking they are there.
Top-downers like Lehrer prefer, of course, to talk about different
examples: Madame Curie discovering radium, Sherlock figuring out
who poisoned Colonel Mustard, and so on. Everyone, for perfectly
understandable reasons, wants to emphasize the cases that best fit their
theory. But although top-downers and bottom-uppers (for obvious theoretical reasons) choose different examples to motivate their analysis,
they should, when talking about the "same" example, at least agree
about whether or not it is a genuine instance of knowledge whether
or not the person or animal sees, remembers, or knows in some intuitive,
preanalytic sense. If philosophers cannot even agree about the data, about
the classification of cases to be accounted for by a theory of knowledge,
then bickering about the right analysis of knowledge is as silly as it is
fruitless. They are not even talking about the same thing.
So I think it important to agree about cases before we start disagreeing
about the best way to understand them, about the best way to analyze
them. The question, then, is whether Fido can see where his food bowl
is and see this, moreover, in the same sense in which we (adult human
beings) can see where his food bowl is.12 The way we find out (come to
know) where bowls (and a great many other common objects) are
located is (typically) by seeing where they are. That, I should suppose, is
the way Fido finds out (comes to know) where they are. This, I submit,
is the judgment of common sense and common language. It is the way
everybody talks in their unguarded (unphilosophical) moments. In the
absence of (non-question-begging) reasons for rejecting such intuitive
judgments, then, what a theory of knowledge should supply is, among
other things, an account of what it is that Fido has when he knows (by
seeing) where his food bowl is. If Fido doesn't have the capacity to
distinguish truth from deception, if he doesn't know that what he is
getting from the optical input is correct information, then this shows as
clearly as anything could show that such higher-level capacities are not
needed to know.
Lehrer, obviously, disagrees. He will have a chance to tell us why he
disagrees. Since he will have that opportunity, I will attempt to focus
the discussion by considering an example that he (1988, p. 333) adapts
12 We are assuming, of course, that the bowl is in plain sight, that everyone (humans and
Fido) has excellent vision, and so on. No tricks.

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from me (Dretske 1981). We are, remember, engaged in preliminary

skirmishing. We are not yet arguing about the right analysis of knowledge. We are trying to get clear about what an analysis of knowledge is
supposed to be an analysis of what cases are to count as genuine
knowledge, as instances of what a theory of knowledge is a theory about.
A gauge on a control console registers pressure in a boiler. A nervous
engineer, worried that the gauge might fail (allowing the pressure to
reach critical and dangerous levels), installs a safety device whose function it is to monitor the gauge (and the mechanism connecting it to the
boiler) and flash a warning light if it should happen to malfunction.
Sometime later, after the installation is complete, the warning lightflashes. The gauge registers 190. The engineer (Lehrer, for obvious
reasons, calls her Faith) ignores the warning light and, trusting the gauge,
comes to the belief (on the basis of the reading on the gauge) that the
pressure is 190. As things turn out, everything is working normally except
the newly installed safety device; it mistakenly signals a malfunction in
the pressure gauge. The pressure gauge is operating normally, delivering
(as it has always delivered) information about the pressure. It says the
pressure is 190 and the pressure is 190. Faith, therefore, not only comes
to have a true belief (that the pressure is 190), but comes to have it on
the basis of a reliably functioning gauge.
What is one to say about such a case? Faith has a true belief about
the pressure, and this true belief is reached by trusting a gauge that
delivers information that the pressure is 190. It turns out she is right
(about the pressure), but being right isn't good enough for knowledge.
Lehrer (I infer) thinks that common opinion will agree with him in
saying that Faith does not know what the pressure is. This is not to be
counted as an instance of knowledge. Since, by extension, Fido is in no
better position than Faith they both trust, in an unreflective and
uncritical way, an old source of information Fido doesn't know either.
So, whether or not, in the first instance, common sense agrees with him
about Fido, it (Lehrer might urge) should agree with him and, perhaps,
will agree with him once the "stakes" are made clear in this way. And if
common sense does agree with him, then, of course, externalists (like
myself) are in trouble. For what such examples clearly suggest is that it
isn't enough to be connected to the facts in the right way (the way Fido
and Faith are). If one is irrational, stupid, uncritical, or simply too
trusting about one's sources of information, if one doesn't know that
one is getting genuine information, one is, by commonsense standards,
judged not to know. But being rational, critical, and intelligent about

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one's sources is just what internalism (of the sort favored by Lehrer)
asserts.
Lehrer thinks (and says) that externalists like myself will classify this
case differently, that we will say that Faith knows the pressure is 190. If
this were so, then, of course, we would be disagreeing about cases once
again, and the implication would be that externalists, operating with a
strong theoretical bias, and contrary to commonsense intuitions, are
judging the case so as to fit their theory. But Lehrer is wrong about this.
At least he is wrong about me. The reason he thinks we disagree about
this case is because he has changed the example. He has converted it
into a case where Faith, the person whose knowledge (or lack of it) one
is asked to judge, is being described as quite unreasonable in trusting the
gauge. Why, for example, does she ignore the flashing warning light?
She knows (we are told) that it signals a malfunctioning pressure gauge,
and yet, she inexplicably ignores the light and trusts the gauge. What a
remarkably stupid thing to do. Lehrer is certainly right: it is hard to
credit her with knowledge. I join Keith (and, I assume, commonsense)
in saying that in such circumstances Faith doesn't know.
But although we agree about how to classify the example, we disagree
about why Faith doesn't know. Lehrer says it is because Faith doesn't
know she is getting accurate information from the gauge. Externalists,
bottom-uppers like myself, would say that she lacks knowledge because
knowledge requires, among other things,13 getting information (being
properly connected to the facts) in something like normal circumstances,
and Faith's circumstances are not at all normal. It is one thing to see
(and thereby come to know) what time it is by glancing at a familiar
clock situated in a familiar setting (on the wall of one's home, say). It is
quite another to trust the same clock when it is sitting, partially disman-

13 Lehrer keeps saying that I think that if a person receives the information that P, then she
knows that P (1990, p. 33; 1988, p. 332). This, of course, is not true. Human beings (not
to mention animals, gauges, computers, etc.) receive enormous quantities of information
every minute. Most of this information does not result in knowledge. Knowledge requires
the receipt of information, yes, but it requires more. It requires that this information cause
belief, and cause it, moreover, in something like normal conditions (see discussion in text).
Lehrer also insists that externalists overlook the fact that knowledge requires not only
receiving information (satisfaction of the externalist condition) but also acceptance of the
fact that one is receiving information (acceptance of the fact that this externalist condition
is satisfied). I have never overlooked this fact. The fact that the information that P causes
a belief that P evinces an acceptance (not, of course, in Lehrer's sense, but in a relevant
ordinary sense) of the fact that one is getting such information. The information doesn't
cause belief in those who do not (in the required sense) accept it as information.

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tied but still running accurately, on a workbench at the local repair shop.
There is no reason why externalists like myself have to treat these cases
in the same way. Although information is still being transmitted, it is no
longer clear that that, in fact, is what is causing belief.14
So externalists, bottom-uppers like myself, can agree with Lehrer that
in his version of the example, Faith does not know. We disagree (not
unexpectedly given our different theories) about why she doesn't
know, but at least we agree about the data agree about the fact that,
measured against a commonsense yardstick, she doesn't know. What
remains to be settled, and this brings us back closer to Fido's situation,
is whether there is agreement about the example in its original version,
a version that more closely approximates (and was deliberately designed
to approximate) ordinary cases of perceptual knowledge.
In my original version of the example, the attendant, the one who
ignored the warning light and trusted the gauge, was not the same
person as the engineer who installed the safety device. Although the
engineer knows what the flashing light means (and would, were he
behaving reasonably, mistrust the pressure gauge), the attendant, the one
whose knowledge was being assessed, did not. She was, therefore, not
being irrational in trusting the gauge. She was merely trusting a source
of information that had, over the weeks, months, or years she had used
it, proven reliable. She was, in this respect, just like Fido, young children, or a brain-damaged adult. She was just like you and me during
most of our waking lives when we unthinkingly trust what our senses,
our friends, and our books and newspapers tell us. So the question that
it is important to get clear about, the question I want to put to Keith,
the question the example (in its original version) was meant to pose, is
this: assuming a reliable source of information (e.g., the pressure gauge)
and perfectly normal circumstances from the point of view of the potential knower (i.e., my version of the example), does one know when
caused to believe by the reliable source? Does Faith know in my version
of the example?
The existence of a malfunctioning safety device, and the (misleading)
counterevidence it supplies, is really an irrelevant detail. This was origi-

14 The discussion about "relevant conditions" in the recent literature is an attempt to specify
the sorts of conditions in which reliable connections (that produce belief) yield knowledge. The counterfactual analysis of conclusive reasons (Dretske 1969) and information
(Dretske 1981) are attempts to use the "logic" of counterfactuals to determine relevant
circumstances.

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nally included merely to make it hard for people like myself (externalists,
bottom-uppers). It makes the case harder for externalists because (I have
found) the presence of this counterevidence (misleading though it be) is
enough to persuade some people to say that Faith does not know (even
when she satisfies most externalist conditions for knowing). If we remove this small detail, though, we get something that is, in most people's opinion at least, a paradigm case of knowledge: Faith seeing (by
the gauge) what the pressure is. If this isn't knowledge, the sort of thing
a theory of knowledge is supposed to count as knowledge, I, for one,
fail to understand the project anymore. If Faith cannot see what the
pressure is (hence, know what the pressure is) by trusting a perfectly
operating gauge in completely routine circumstances, then there isn't
much left for a theory of knowledge to account for. For, as most people
will recognize, the gauge is merely a sensory prosthetic - an extension
of our biological information delivery (= perceptual) systems. It plays
no essential role in the dialectic. If we cannot rely on it as a trusted
provider of information, then it is hard to see why we should be able to
rely on our eyes, ears, and nose. Or, indeed, anything at all.
But if, without checking or conducting special tests, Faith can come
to know by trusting a reliable instrument, an instrument that is, in fact,
delivering the right information, why can't Fido know when he trusts
the deliverances of his equally reliable senses when they are delivering
the required information?
REFERENCES

Dretske, F. 1969. Seeing and Knowing. Chicago, 111.; University of Chicago Press.
Dretske, F. 1981. Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Boston, Mass.; MIT Press/A
Bradford Book.
Lehrer, K. 1988. "Metaknowledge: Undefeated Justification," in: Synthese 74, 329347.
Lehrer, K. 1989. "Knowledge Reconsidered," in: Knowledge and Skepticism, Marjorie
Clay & Keith Lehrer (eds.). Boulder, Co.; Westview Press.
Lehrer, K. 1990. Theory of Knowledge. Boulder, Co.; Westview Press.

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Part Two
Perception and Experience

6
Simple Seeing

I met Virgil Aldrich for the first time in the fall of 1969 when I arrived
in Chapel Hill to attend a philosophy conference. My book, Seeing and
Knowing,1 had just appeared a few months earlier. Virgil greeted me with
a copy of it under his arm, whisked me off to a quiet corner in a local
coffee shop, and proceeded to cross-examine me on its contents.
I confess to remembering very little about this conversation. I was, of
course, flattered by the attention, and delighted to see his copy of the
book full of underlining and marginalia. He had obviously been studying
it. This fact so overwhelmed me that I found it difficult to keep my
mind on the conversation. What could I have written that he found so
absorbing? Did he like it? Did he agree with me? It was hard to tell.
Since then I have discovered what provoked Virgil's interest. It seems
we disagree about what seeing amounts to what it means, or what is
essential to, our seeing things. This, by itself, is not particularly noteworthy since (as I have also discovered) many, and sometimes it seems
most, philosophers disagree with me on this topic. The significance of
Virgil's and my disagreement about visual perception lies not in the fact
that we disagree, but in how we disagree. For it turns out that we are
more or less natural allies in this area. We are both trying to resist what
we view as a mistaken conflation of perception with conception, both
trying to preserve the distinction between sentience and sapience, both
trying to isolate and describe a way of seeing, simple seeing as it has

Reprinted from D. F. Gustafson and B. L. Tapscott, eds., Body, Mind, and Method, pp. 1
15, copyright 1979 by Kluwer Academic Publishers, with kind permission from Kluwer
Academic Publishers.
1 Chicago (1969).

97

come to be called, that is distinct from, but nonetheless fundamental to,

an organism's higher-level cognitive and conceptual activities. Our disagreement arises over the nature of this phenomenon.
Since our first meeting Virgil has lobbed a few shells into this embattled terrain.2 Some of these missiles had my name on them. Others,
although not directed at me, fell suspiciously close. I therefore welcome
this opportunity to return his fire. And while I have my finger on the
trigger, I intend to spray some shot in other directions.
The point may not need emphasis, but let me stress, nonetheless, that
the issue over simple seeing concerns our seeing of objects and things
not facts about these things. The terms "object" and "thing" are dummy
terms intended to cover such disparate items as tables, houses, cats,
people, games, sunsets, signals, tracks, shadows, movements, flashes, and
specks. We see all these things and more. Since the perception of events,
states of affairs, conditions, and situations introduces special complications that do not concern us here, I will confine myself to such ordinary
things as rocks, robins, mountains, and people.3 Simple seeing is seeing
these sorts of things. What is not at issue is our seeing that there are rocks
in the road, how many people are in the room, where the cat is, whether
the clock has stopped, who is at the door, or what is happening. When
the verb "to see" has a factive nominal (that. . . ) or a question word
clause (who . . . , whether . . . , what . . .) as its complement, a description of what someone sees has epistemic implications.4 It implies something about the conceptual resources of the perceiver. One cannot see
where the cat is unless one sees that she is (say) under the sofa - without
therefore knowing (hence believing) that she is under the sofa. This

I refer, in particular, to "Visual Noticing Without Believing," Mind, Vol. LXXXIII, No.
332, October 1974; "Sight and Light," American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4,
October 1974; "On Seeing What Is Not There," Rice University Studies, Vol. 58, No. 3,
Summer 1972; and his critical review of my book in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXVII,
No, 23, December 10, 1970.
The requisite distinctions get messy, but I want to talk about the verb "to see" insofar as it
takes a direct object and, more specifically, a concrete noun phrase as its direct object. I
will not be concerned with seeing, say, the pattern, the answer, the problem or the trouble.
There are a variety of noun phrases that, when used as direct objects of the verb "to see,"
give the resulting statement epistemic implications. Aside from those mentioned in the
previous footnote, we have the color, the shape., the size, and so on. Psychologists' interest in
the properties or dimensions of things (rather than in the things having these properties or
dimensions) tends, I think, to mislead them into thinking that all statements about what we
see have cognitive implications, that all seeing is knowing (or believing). There is, however,
a significant difference between seeing the round X and seeing the roundness of X (its
shape).

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much is (or should be) uncontroversial. What is controversial, and what

concerns us here, is whether one can see the cat under the sofa in a way
that is free of such discursive implications.
Almost5 everyone agrees that one can see an X (a star, a rock, a cat)
without believing (and, therefore, without knowing) that it (what is
seen) is an X. I have seen stars that I took to be airplane lights, rocks
that I took to be small animals, and cats that I took to be squirrels.
Disagreement exists over whether some belief is necessary to the seeing,
whether one can seen an X without taking it to be anything whatsoever.
This is not a question about whether one can see an X without any
beliefs at all.6 Nor is it a question about whether, in fact, people have
beliefs about the things they see. It is a question about whether their
having a belief about the perceptual object is essential to its being a perceptual
object - essential, that is, to its being seen.
It is easy enough to ignore this question, or to miss its significance,
by changing the subject - by talking not of seeing (say) a triangle, but
of perceiving triangles. On the basis, then, of a technical stipulation (or
simply on the basis of prevelant usage) one notes that the term "perception" is reserved for those sensory transactions that have some kind of
cognitive upshot. The subject (infant, rat, pigeon) does not perceive the
triangle (among the rectangles) unless it identifies it in some way, unless
it displays some appropriate discriminatory response, unless it recognizes the
triangle, if not as a triangle, then at least as the sort of thing to which a
particular conditioned response is appropriate. According to this usage,
perception requires some degree of conceptualization, some identification or categorization of the sensory input. What one perceives is limited
by the stock of concepts (or, if "concepts" is too strong a word, by the
battery of disciminatory responses) one has available for sorting and
organizing the flux of stimulation. If one doesn't know what a triangle
is, if one lacks the capacity to distinguish between triangles and other
geometrical figures, then one does not perceive triangles. Geometrical
figures, perhaps, but not triangles.
If this is the way perception is to be understood and I think this is
the way it is commonly understood in both psychology and philosophy
Almost everyone. I have met those who did not agree (and still don't agree) that one could
see a pencil, say, without recognizing it as a pencil.
I put this point badly in Seeing and Knowing, p. 17, footnote. I said there that it may be
necessary for the seer to have some beliefs, but that no particular belief was necessary. This
is confused. What I should have said is that no belief about the object being seen is necessary
to the seeing.

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 then our question about simple seeing is a question not about visual
perception, but about whatever it is that we use the ordinary verb "to
see" (followed by a concrete noun phrase) to describe. What are we
doing when we see something? Or, if this is not something we do, what
conditions must obtain for us to see a robin, a sunset, or a star? In
particular, can one see a robin without perceiving it? This question may
sound a bit odd, but only because one is accustomed to conflating seeing
with visual perception. But if perception is (either by stipulation or common understanding) cognitively loaded, if some degree of recognition
or categorization is essential to our perception of things, it is by no
means obvious that one must perceive something in order to see it.
Quite the contrary. One learns to perceive (i.e., recognize, identify,
classify) those things that, even before learning takes place, one can see.
What else, one might ask, does one learn to identify?
A second way to muddle issues is by interpreting claims about simple
seeing, not as claims about our ordinary (mature) way of seeing robins,
trees, and people, but as claims about an underdeveloped stage of consciousness, a dim sort of visual awareness, that lower organisms (perhaps)
experience but that human beings (if they experience it at all) quickly
outgrow during infancy. This confusion, I suspect, is nourished by the
failure to distinguish between quite different theses. We have, on the
one hand, the claim that:
(1) Simply seeing X is compatible with no beliefs about X.
On the other hand we have such claims as:
(2a) Simply seeing X is incompatible with beliefs about X,
and
(2b) Simply seeing X occurs only if, as a matter of fact, the seer has no beliefs
about X.
It is (1) that gives expression to the relevant view about simple seeing.
At least it gives expression to the only view I have ever propounded and
thought worthy of defense despite persistent efforts to interpret me
otherwise. To say (as I did in Seeing and Knowing) that seeing a robin
(nonepistemically) is belief neutral is not to say that one cannot see a
robin in this way with a belief to the effect that it is a robin, a bird, or a
thing. It is to say that your seeing the robin is independent of, a relationship that can obtain without, such beliefs.
In my correspondence and discussions with Virgil I have often com-

100

pared seeing X to stepping on X. This had led to some unfortunate

misunderstandings, but the comparison was meant to illustrate the difference between (1) and such possible misinterpretations as (2a) and (2b).
Just as one can step on X with or without a knowledge of (or belief about)
what one is stepping on, one can see X with or without a knowledge of
(or belief about) what one is seeing. Seeing X, just like stepping on X,
is compatible with no beliefs about X.
Which is not to say that seeing X is incompatible with holding beliefs
about X, that if you do recognize what you see, if you do take it to be
something or other, that you no longer see it in the relevant sense. This
interpretation of simple seeing (in accordance with (2a)) would make it
into some mysterious kind of relation totally irrelevant to our ordinary
perceptual experience. For we do recognize much of what we see. I
seldom sit down at my typewriter in the morning without believing it
to be my typewriter. This doesn't mean I don't see it. I doubt whether
there is any sense of the verb "to see" that is inconsistent with the
subject's believing something about the object seen just as I doubt
whether there is any sense of the verb "to step on" that is incompatible
with the subject's believing something about that on which he steps.
There are passages in which, if I read him right, Virgil takes me to be
defending something like (2b). He suggests, for example, that if one
looks with good eyes at a billiard ball at arm's length in clear light, and
(not realizing that it is a billiard ball) wonders what that red, shiny,
round thing is, then one is not seeing it in my sense (nonepistemically)
because one already knows too much about it.7 One knows that it is
red, shiny, and round. At other times he seems to suggest that if the
report of what is seen conveys information about what is seen, then it
cannot be a report of what is simply seen in my sense.8 I plead innocent
to both charges. They misrepresent me as defending (2b) or possibly
(2a). The second charge commits the additional mistake of confusing
the report of what is seen with the seeing. One could as well argue that
stepping on Xis an epistemic act because a report of what is stepped on
will convey information about what is stepped on.
I make a fuss about this issue because I have repeatedly had it suggested to me that nonepistemic seeing, or simple seeing as we are now
calling it, is something that occurs only rarely in adult human beings.
Perhaps lower organisms (goldfish?) see things nonepistemically; perhaps
7
8

"Visual Noticing Without Believing," p. 525.

Review of Seeing and Knowing in The Journal of Philosophy, December 10, 1970, p. 1002.

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infants see things nonepistemically (before they can focus on objects);

and perhaps adults sometimes see things nonepistemically (in their peripheral vision while they are attending to other matters); but the vast
majority of our perceptual encounters involve something more sophisticated than simple seeing. This, I submit, is a confusion of (1) with
either (2a) or (2b). Once one is clear about this, it should also become
clear that the sense in which an adult human being sees a familiar object
in clear light with good eyes (and, as a result, recognizes it) is the same
sense in which a six-month-old infant, a chimpanzee, or a pigeon sees
something that is totally unfamiliar. Seeing what something is is compatible with, and in most instances requires, simply seeing it.9
There is, finally, one last source of confusion that has helped to blur
whatever genuine differences may exist among philosophers about the
nature of simple seeing. This is the mistake of supposing that the seer is
in some special, privileged position for determining what is seen and,
therefore, whether something is seen. This doctrine takes its most extreme, and least plausible, form in the view that if 5 does not believe
she sees X, then S does not see X. A less extreme, but still implausible,
version has it that if S believes she does not see X, then S does not see
X. Transposition of the first yields the result that one cannot see X unless
one believes one sees X a flat-out denial of the thesis (expressed in (1))
that simple seeing is compatible with no beliefs about X. The second,
less extreme, version is not a direct denial of (1), but it does have the
implication that seeing X is incompatible with certain beliefs: viz., the
belief that one does not see X.
The fact is, however, that people are not authorities about what they
see - not, at least, in the way suggested by the preceding two principles.
Whether or not you saw my grandmother is a question that in some
situations I am in a better position to determine than you. If you, with
a mistaken idea of who my grandmother is, smugly assert that you did
not see my grandmother today, I can correct you by pointing out that
you certainly did: she was the woman to whom you gave your seat on
the bus. If you respond by saying that you did not realize that that little
old lady was my grandmother, the lesson is clear. The question was a
question not about who you identified today, but about who you saw
today. You may be the authority about what you believe you see, but

That this was my intention is clear from the fact that my analysis of primary epistemic seeing
(seeing that so-and-so is such-and-such) requires the subject to see (nonepistemically) soand-so.

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this does not make you an authority about what you see. In situations
of this sort, one sees X without believing one sees X while believing,
in fact, that one does not see X.
Although this is perfectly obvious on one level, the illusion persists
that if S does not believe she sees X, or (worse) believes she does not
see X, then there are special problems associated with the claim that she
does, nonetheless, see X. If, upon returning from the dresser drawer, a
man sincerely asserts that he did not see the cuff link, if this is what he
really believes, then he must not have seen it. This, though, is the
evidential sense of "must," the sense in which we might say, "Since he
does not believe he has ever been to Hawaii, he must not have been
there." S's beliefs on such matters are (at best) only evidence for what
she sees. If S does not believe she saw X, the quality of this belief as
evidence that she did not see X depends on whether S knows what Xs
look like, the conditions (normal or abnormal) in which she saw X, and
a host of other cognitive factors that are independent of whether or not
she saw X. What a person believes (about what she sees), and what she
is consequently prepared to assert or deny about what she sees, is conditioned by the conceptual and cognitive resources she has available for
picking out and identifying what she sees. If she does not know what a
marsupial is, she isn't likely to believe that she sees one. And if she
mistakenly believes that kangaroos are the only marsupials, she might
well believe she sees no marsupials when, in fact, she sees them (opossums) all over the yard.
There are strong philosophical motivations for denying any beliefneutral form of seeing (simple seeing). The inspiration for such denials
comes, I think, from positivistic and (more specifically) behavioristic
sources. If S's seeing X is only contingently related to S's beliefs about X,
if she could see X with no beliefs about X, then there is no secure basis
in S's behavior (linguistic or otherwise) for determining whether or not
she does see X Seeing is deprived of its logical or conceptual links with
the observational data base.
This epistemological consequence is alarming enough to goad some
philosophers into interpreting good eyesight as a cognitive capacity so as
to secure the requisite links with behavior. If seeing X can be interpreted
as a form of believing (if not believing that it is X, at least believing that
it is Y where " Y" is a description that applies to X), then, since believing
has behavioral criteria, seeing does also. One of the currently fashionable
ways of achieving this linkage is by identifying psychological states with
functional states of the organism. Since a functional state is one that

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transforms certain inputs into certain outputs, since it is defined by its

associated input output matrix (Putnam's machine table), an organism
is in a determinate mental state (e.g., seeing X) only if its input is being
converted into appropriate output only if it behaves, or tends to
behave, in a certain kind of way. If seeing X is (in part at least) a
psychological state, if psychological states are functional states, if functional states are defined by the output they produce, and if output is
(aside from simple reflexes, tropisms, etc.) indicative of beliefs, then all
seeing is believing.10
There is much to be said for functional theories. From an evolutionary standpoint it is hard to see how a perceptual system could develop
unless it had a role to play in an organism's continuing adjustment to its
surroundings, and this adjustment is obviously a matter of an organism's
responses to its environment. But a mechanism (e.g., our sensory system)
can have a function without the operations of this mechanism having
functional criteria for their successful performance. Cam shafts also have
a function. They lift valves.11 But this doesn't mean that cam shafts
cannot operate in the way they were designed to operate without lifting
valves. If the valves are not being lifted, this does not mean that the cam
shaft isn't rotating so as to lift the valves. For in order for a cam shaft to
perform its function it must have the cooperation of a number of other
auxiliary mechanisms (rocker arms, lifters, guides, etc.). If these other
elements are not functioning properly, the cam shaft makes its appointed
rounds, operating in the fashion it was designed to operate, without the
usual consequences. The valves don't get lifted. And so it is with seeing.
Unless the cognitive mechanisms are in proper working order (and
learning is required to put them into proper working condition) the
sensory systems (those responsible for our seeing, hearing, smelling, and
tasting things) can perform their role in this total operation without the
kind of cognitive effects associated with a fully mature, and properly
functioning, organism.

10 This sort of functional analysis can be found in D. C. Dennett's Content and Consciousness,
London, 1969. See also Hilary Putnam's "The Nature of Mental States," in Materialism
and the Mind Body Problem, edited by David Rosenthal, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; 1971,
and David Lewis's "An Argument for the Identity Theory" in the same volume, reprinted
from The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXIII, 1, January 6, 1966.
11 This example is taken from Fodor, Psychological Explanation, New York, 1968. For my
purposes it makes no difference whether we refer to the cam shaft as a cam shaft or as a
valve lifter (i.e., in explicitly functional terms) as long as it is clear that we are referring to
the cam shaft (and not some larger functional unit).

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I do not expect these brief remarks to satisfy functional theorists.12

What is needed is some positive account of the role simple seeing plays
in the process of gathering and utilizing sensory information. To this
positive account I now turn.
Some of our beliefs are about the things we see: I believe that that is
my wife, that this is a bushing, that those are oaks. Such beliefs are called
de re beliefs; what they are about (that, this, those) is not determined by
whatever description (if any) the believer may happen to have available
for describing or picking out what it is that his belief is about. The
referent of the belief, what it is a belief about, is fixed by factors other
than those descriptive elements we may possess for its specification. It is
fixed by what you see, not by what you believe you see or believe about
what you see.
Suppose that you see Marvin and believe that he is Michael. What
makes this belief a false belief about Marvin rather than a true belief
about Michael? If asked who it is that you believe to be Michael, you
can point. Or you can try to describe what you see, and what you
believe to be Michael, in terms sufficiently detailed to allow your listeners to identify the object of belief: that fellow standing in the field, the
person talking to Hilda, and so on. The point to notice about these
descriptions (and the gesture of pointing) is that they may or may not
succeed in picking out whom (or what) you believe to be Michael. If
you have mistaken a tree stump for Michael, your belief is about the tree
stump, not (as you say) about a person standing in the field (there may
be no person standing in the field). If you are (unwittingly) looking into
a mirror, you will not be pointing at the person you believe to be
Michael (which is not to say that your listeners couldn't discover whom
you were talking about from your gesture and knowledge of the mirror).
And there needn't be anyone talking to Hilda for you to believe of the
person or thing (that you believe to be a person talking to Hilda) that it
is Michael.
At the risk of incurring Virgil's displeasure, let me don my funster hat
for the moment and describe a mildly unusual case.13 I have just copied
a letter on a high-quality machine. At arm's length in good light the

12

13

I have tried to do a little better in "The Role of the Percept in Visual Cognition,"
Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. IX, edited by Wade Savage, Minneapolis,
1978.
This example is an adaptation of one used by my colleague, Dennis Stampe, to illustrate a
similar point.

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copy is indistinguishable from the original. I place the copy (thoughtlessly confusing it with the original) neatly on top of the original (so that
only the copy is visible), gaze down at it (them?), and notice what I take
to be a smudge on the top sheet. As it turns out, I am mistaken (it was
only a shadow) but, as chance would have it, the original (which I
cannot see) is smudged in just the way I thought the top sheet was. I
obviously have a number of false beliefs: viz., that this sheet is smudged,
that this sheet is the original letter. What makes these beliefs false is the
fact that they are (contrary to what I believe) beliefs about the copy.
What, then, makes these beliefs beliefs about the copy and not about
the original?
It will come as no surprise to find that the answer to this question is
that my beliefs are about the first sheet (the copy), not the second (the
original), because I see the first sheet, not the second, and my belief is
about what I see. This answer isn't very illuminating. For we are now
trying to say what it is that constitutes one's seeing the first sheet, what
makes the first (not the second) sheet the perceptual object and, therefore,
the thing about which I have a belief. Since what I believe (that it is
smudged, that it is the original letter) about the perceptual object is true
of something (the second sheet) that is not the perceptual object, what I
believe about what I see does not itself determine what I see. What does
determine this?
It will not do to say that I am seeing the copy because I am looking at
the copy (not the original) since any sense of "looking at" that does not
beg the question (e.g., you can only look at things you see) is a sense in
which I am also looking at the original.14 If the copy was removed
(revealing, thereby, the original letter) my experience would not change
in any qualitative respect. Convergence, accommodation, and focus
would remain the same since the original is (for all practical purposes) in
the same place as the copy. Obviously, then, these factors, no more than
belief, determine what it is that I see. What does?

14 Sometimes Virgil seems to suggest that looking at X is sufficient for seeing X. For example,
he says that there is a weak sense of simply seeing something in which "to be looking at
something is to see it." "Sight and Light," American Philosophical Quarterly, October 1974,
note on p. 320. I doubt whether there is such a sense of the verb "to see." He goes on to
say, however, that he distinguishes seven senses of "simply see." Since it isn't clear to me
whether these are supposed to be distinct senses of the ordinary verb "to see" (or special
senses of a technical term "simply see"), and since I am not sure I understand Virgil's
sense of "looking at," I hesitate to pin this view on him.

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It may be said that there is one belief I have that is true of, and only
true of, the thing I see: namely, that I see it (assuming I see only one
thing). This gets us nowhere. For what makes my belief (that I see it)
true of the copy, not the original? What makes the copy, not the original,
the referent of "it"? Answer: the fact that I see the copy (not the
original) and what I refer to with "it" is what I see. Since this is so, we
are back to where we started: what singles out the copy as the perceptual
object, as the thing I see?
I have no doubt exhausted the patience of causal theorists by this
time. Isn't it clear, they will tell us, that the perceptual object is determined by the causal antecedents of our visual experience? Light is being
reflected from the copy, not the original, and since it is this object that is
(causally) responsible for the experience I am having, it is this object that
I see. The fact that removal of the copy (exposing, thereby, the original
letter) would leave the experience qualitatively unchanged, would perhaps (if it was removed without my knowledge) leave all my beliefs
unchanged, is immaterial. It would change what I see because it would
change the causal origin of the resultant experience.
Whether a causal account is ultimately satisfactory or not (I shall have
more to say about this in a moment), it does succeed in driving a wedge
between perception and conception. It divorces questions about what
we see from questions about what, if anything, we know or believe
about what we see. It distinguishes questions about the etiology of our
experience from questions about the effects of that experience. Insofar as
it achieves this separation it succeeds in capturing the essence of simple
seeing.
The causal theory gets this part of the story correct, and it is for this
reason that it represents such an attractive candidate for the analysis of
simple seeing. It explains, among other things, how it is possible to have
all one's beliefs about X false while still being about X. What makes my
beliefs about the copy is the fact that I stand to the copy in the appropriate causal relation, the relation that, according to this view of things,
constitutes my seeing the copy. What makes all my beliefs false is the fact
that nothing I believe (e.g., that it is smudged, that it is the original
letter) is true of the thing to which I stand in this causal relation.
The difficulties in articulating a full-dress causal analysis are well
known, and I do not intend to rehearse them here. I mention two
problems only for the purpose of indicating why, despite its attractive
features, I do not personally subscribe to such a view. There is, first, the

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problem of stating just how an object must figure in the generation of a

person's experience to qualify as the object of that experience. Typically,
of course, there are a great many causal factors that cooperate to determine the character of our sensory experience. Price's distinction between standing and differential conditions is a useful one in this regard,
but, as Grice has made clear, we need more than this.15 When you hear
a doorbell ring, you hear the bell ring, not the button being depressed,
even though both events (the bell's ringing and the button's being
depressed) are causally involved in the production of your auditory
experience. Both are differential conditions. What, then, singles out the
bell's ringing (not the button's being pushed) as the perceptual object?
The causal theory has little to say in answer to this question.
A second problem has to do with the nature of the causal relation
itself. Just what do we mean when we say that A causes B, that A is
causally responsible for B, or that B is one of A's effects? There is
remarkably little agreement among philosophers about the answers to
these questions. This intramural squabbling would not be particularly
embarrassing to a causal analysis of perception if the disputed issues
were not themselves germane to the questions we wanted answered
about perception. But this is precisely what is not the case. The absorption of photons by the photosensitive pigment on the rods and cones,
for example, is a quantum process with all that this implies about the
indeterminacy of such events. This indeterminacy can be made to
manifest itself under conditions of extremely low illumination: whether
the subject will see a faint light is, in principle, unpredictable.16 Is this
to be called a causal process? It depends on which philosopher one
asks.17
We get information about things by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting,
and touching them. To say that someone has seen X is to say that
information about X has been delivered in a particular form, a form that
differs, intrinsically, from the way information is coded when we hear,
15 H. H. Price, Perception, 1932, pp. 69ff; and H. P. Grice, "The Causal Theory of Perception,"

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. XXXV, 1961, reprinted in Perceiving,

Sensing and Knowing, edited by Robert J. Swartz, Garden City, N.Y., 1965.
16 See, for example, "The Quantum Theory of Light and the Psycho-Physiology of Vision"
in Psychology: The Study of a Science, edited by Sigmund Koch, New York, 1959.
17 One standard view of causality makes the cause part of some nomically sufficient condition
for the effect (the so-called Reliability Analysis). Since (if we take contemporary physics
seriously) there is no sufficient condition for a photon's absorption, nothing causes it to be
absorbed on this analysis of causality. This, then, constitutes a break in the causal chain
between subject and object.

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smell, taste, or touch X.18 If we do not press too hard on the idea of
causality, we may say that this information is delivered by means of
causal mechanisms and processes. When we see X, X (or some event
associated with the presence of X) initiates a sequence of events that
culminates in a distinctive sort of experience, the sort we call a visual
experience. Typically, this experience embodies information about the
color, shape, size, position, and movement of X. The role or function
of the sensory systems in the total cognitive process is to get the message
in so that a properly equipped receiver can modulate her responses to
the things about which she is getting information. The sensory system is
the postal system in this total cognitive enterprise. It is responsible for
the delivery of information, and its responsibility ends there. What we do
with this information, once received, whether we are even capable of
interpreting the messages so received, are questions about the cognitiveconceptual resources of the perceiver. If you don't take the letters from
the mailbox, or if you can't understand them once you do, don't blame
the postal system. It has done its job. The trouble lies elsewhere.
This, in barest outline, is an information-theoretical account of simple
seeing. It differs from a causal account not by denying that causal processes are at work in the delivery of information, but by denying that
this is the essence of the matter. Seeing X is getting information (coded
in a certain way) about X, and if information about X can be delivered
by noncausal processes, so much the worse for causality. If the processes
by means of which we see very faint stars are infected with the uncertainty, the inherent randomness, of quantum phenomena, and if such
processes are not to be counted as causal in nature, then we see things
to which we do not stand in the appropriate causal relation. But we still
see them, and the reason we do is because the experience that is generated by the occurrence of these inherently random events embodies
information about the distant stars (e.g., where they are).
I should want to say the same thing about the factors that Virgil finds
so important to our seeing things: ocular focusing, binocular convergence, accommodation, illumination, and so on. Doubtless these things
18 The key to vision is not what information is delivered (information about the color, shape,
and size of things) but how this information is delivered. We can, of course, see that
something is hot, hard, or salty (by looking at the litmus paper). What makes these cases
of seeing is that this information is delivered in characteristically visual form (roughly: in
terms of the way things look rather than the way they feel or taste). Virgil. ("Sight and
Light," p. 319) attributes to me the view that seeing is determined by what we can tell
(about objects) rather than (as I believe) how we tell it.

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are important. Ask an ophthalmologist. But, again, they don't touch the
essence of simple seeing. They don't isolate what is essential to our
seeing things. As things stand, I cannot see much if my eyeballs point in
different directions. But a fish can. I cannot see the window frame very
clearly if I focus on the trees I see through the window. But I do,
sometimes, see the window frame and the trees. I may not be able to
identify, or tell you much about, the other children playing in the
schoolyard if I concentrate my attention on the little girl jumping rope.
But it seems to me obvious that I see a great many children besides the
one I watch. Look at a flag for a few moments. How many stars do you
see? If the flag has fifty stars, and none of them are obscured by folds in
the cloth or by other objects, it seems reasonable enough to say you saw
them all. All fifty. Which one or ones did you notice? It sounds odd (at
least to my ear) to say that you noticed every star on the flag, but not at
all odd to say you saw them all.19 What makes our visual experience the
rich and profuse thing we know it to be is that we see more than we can
ever notice or attend to. The sensory systems, and in particular the visual
system, delivers more information than we can ever (cognitively) digest.
The postal system deposits junk mail at a rate that exceeds our capacity
to read it.
In speaking of sensory systems in the way that I have, as systems
responsible for the delivery of information, it should be emphasized that
the term "information" is being used here in the way we speak of light
(from a star) as carrying information about the chemical constitution of
the star or the way the height of a mercury column (in a thermometer)
carries information about the temperature. These events or states of
affairs carry or embody information about something else but, of course,
no one may succeed in extracting that information. It is in this sense that
our visual (auditory, tactual, etc.) experience embodies information
about our surroundings. It can carry this information without the subject's (undergoing the experience) ever extracting that information for

19 If I understand him correctly, Virgil would like to deny that peripherally seen objects are
really seen or that we see the other stars on the flag if we notice, say, only the slightly offcolor star on the upper right. "Acute full-fledged seeing, in the basic sense, requires
undivided visual attention, and this involves full ocular concentration" ("Visual Noticing
Without Believing," p. 521). Once again I am reluctant to attribute this view to him
since I don't think I understand what he means by noticing something. Since he also
distinguishes between "consummated" and "unconsummated" basic seeing, and takes
some seeing as more basic than others, the issues are clouded by this fragmentation in senses
of "seeing."

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cognitive purposes. Once again, learning is required to crack the sensory

codes.
In Seeing and Knowing I tried to distinguish this informationtheoretical approach to simple seeing (or, as I then called it, "nonepistemic seeing") from a causal account by asking the reader to imagine
someone able to tell what the objects on the far side of a massive wall
were doing, what color they were, their shape and size, without any
transmission of light between the objects and the subject. The point of
this exercise was to illustrate that it was the delivery of information, not
the causal connection, that was essential to our seeing things. As long as
information about X is getting through, and as long as this information
is being delivered in characteristically visual form, then X is being seen
whether or not there is a causal process responsible for the delivery of
this information. If it is found that the eyes played no essential role in
this process, if light is unnecessary, then so much the worse for the
standard scientific accounts of how we see. As a child I never found the
visual exploits of Superman (seeing through buildings) incoherent or
logically paradoxical. I still don't. This was just a fanciful ("fanciful"
because, as things stand, no one can see things in this way) account of an
extraordinary individual who could see things in ways that no one else
could. Historians tell me that the ancients had even more bizzare conceptions of how we see things. They were wrong about how we see, but
they weren't committing logical howlers.20 They just didn't know, as
we now know, how we obtain information about distant objects and
events.
My earlier account of simple seeing as visual differentiation was (as I
would now express it) a way of describing the subject's visual experience
so as to ensure that it did carry information about the object seen. As
long as X is differentiated from its background and surroundings in the
relevant way, the experience embodies information about the relative
size, shape, position, and movement of X. If light is being reflected from
X in such a way that X is not visually differentiated from its background
(e.g., a white sheet of paper fastened to a white wall at fifty paces), then,
although light from X is being received, although the subject is looking
20 Virgil says ("Sight and Light," p. 319) that the suggestion that one might see the yellow
of wax with cosmic rays is a logical howler. He goes on to explain that yellow already is
another wave frequency, and cautions the reader to be careful about saying that this is a
"contingent fact" I have tried to be careful, and I have the greatest respect for Virgil's
conceptual acuity; but I confess to hearing only contingent falsehoods where he hears
conceptual howlers.

Ill

at and focussing on X, no information about the size, shape, whereabouts,

or movement of X is being received. Under such circumstances X
cannot be seen.
My talk of experiences and their intrinsic qualities may sound quaint
to contemporary ears. It sounds mentalistic like an old ghost in a new
machine.21 Quite frankly, it is intended to sound mentalistic, but not in
the way a dualist understands this. It is intended to sound mentalistic to
precisely the degree that our talk of seeing things sounds mentalistic. We
are, after all, trying to give an account of one important aspect of our
conscious life. Why, in pursuit of that end, should one be forbidden to
talk about our sensory experience? This needn't be a way of talking
about images in the head, little pictures, muffled sounds, and diluted
tastes monitored by an ethereal homunculus. To talk about our sensory
experience is simply to talk about certain internal events and processes
(internal in the sense of being distinct from either input or output) that
are essential to one's seeing, hearing, and smelling things. What is important about these internal events, insofar as we are interested in the
difference between seeing X and hearing X, is their intrinsic properties
how they code the information about X This is mentalism, yes, but (as
Fodor so nicely puts it22) a version of mentalism that contrasts not with
materialism, but with behaviorism.
It seems to me, then, that one cannot formulate a satisfactory account
of simple seeing by embellishing the Causal Theory with details about
the way, in fact, we see things. All one gets is a bloated concept of
seeing. Seeing objects is a way of getting information about them. What
makes it seeing (rather than, say, hearing) is the intrinsic character of
those events occurring in us that carry the information. What makes it
X (rather than Y) that we see is that the information these internal
events carry is information about X (rather than Y). Everything else, I
submit, is empirical icing on the conceptual cake something the
scientist, not the philosopher, should provide.

21 My talk of experience in this connection is (I think) what prompts Virgil to charge me

with mentalism and assorted other Cartesian sins.
22 Psychological Explanation, Chapter 2.

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7
Conscious Experience1

There is a difference between hearing Clyde play the piano and seeing
him play the piano. The difference consists in a difference in the kind of
experience caused by Clyde's piano playing. Clyde's performance can
also cause a belief the belief that he is playing the piano. A perceptual
belief that he is playing the piano must be distinguished from a perceptual experience of this same event. A person (or an animal, for that
matter) can hear or see a piano being played without knowing, believing, or judging that a piano is being played. Conversely, a person (I do
not know about animals) can come to believe that Clyde is playing the
piano without seeing or hearing him do it without experiencing the
performance for herself.
This distinction between a perceptual experience of x and a perceptual belief about x is, I hope, obvious enough. I will spend some time
enlarging upon it, but only for the sake of sorting out relevant interconnections (or lack thereof). My primary interest is not in this distinction
but, rather, in what it reveals about the nature of conscious experience
and, thus, consciousness itself. For unless one understands the difference
between a consciousness of things (Clyde playing the piano) and a
consciousness of facts (that he is playing the piano), and the way this
difference depends, in turn, on a difference between a concept-free
mental state (e.g., an experience) and a concept-charged mental state
(e.g., a belief), one will fail to understand how one can have conscious
experiences without being aware that one is having them. One will fail

I am grateful to Berent Enc, Giiven Guzeldere, Lydia Sanchez, Ken Norman, David Robb,
and Bill Lycan for critical feedback. I would also like to thank the Editor and anonymous
referees of Mind for a number of very helpful suggestions.

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to understand, therefore, how an experience can be conscious without

anyone's - including the person having it - being conscious of having
it. Failure to understand how this is possible constitutes a failure to
understand what makes something conscious and, hence, what consciousness is.
The possibility of a person's having a conscious experience she is not
conscious of having will certainly sound odd, perhaps even contradictory, to those philosophers who (consciously or not) embrace an inner
spotlight view of consciousness according to which a mental state is
conscious insofar as the light of consciousness shines on it thus making
one conscious of it.2 It will also sound confused to those like Dennett
(1991) who, although rejecting theater metaphors (and the spotlight
images they encourage), espouse a kind of first-person operationalism
about mental phenomena that links conscious mental states to those that
can be reported and of which, therefore, the reporter is necessarily aware
of having.
There is, however, nothing confused or contradictory about the idea
of a conscious experience that one is not conscious of having. The first
step in understanding the nature of conscious experience is understanding why this is so.
1. AWARENESS OF FACTS AND AWARENESS OF THINGS3
For purposes of this discussion I regard "conscious" and "aware" as
synonyms. Being conscious of a thing (or fact) is being aware of it.
Accordingly, "conscious awareness" and "consciously aware" are redundancies.
A. White (1964) describes interesting differences between the ordinary use of "aware" and "conscious." He also describes the different
liaisons they have to noticing, attending, and realizing. Although my
treatment of these expressions (for the purposes of this inquiry) as synonymous blurs some of these ordinary distinctions, even (occasionally)
violating some of the strictures White records, nothing essential to my
I am thinking here of those who subscribe to what are called higher-order thought (HOT)
theories of consciousness, theories that hold that what makes an experience conscious is its
being an object of some higher-order thought or experience. See Rosenthal (1986, 1990,
1991), Armstrong (1968, 1980, especially Ch. 4, "What Is Consciousness?"), and Lycan
(1987, 1992). I return to these theories in 4.
This section is a summary and minor extension of points I have made elsewhere; see
especially Dretske (1969, 1978, 1979).

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project is lost by ignoring the niceties. No useful theory of consciousness

can hope (nor, I think, should it even aspire) to capture all the subtle
nuances of ordinary usage.
By contrasting our awareness of things (x) with our awareness of facts
(that P) I mean to be distinguishing particular (spatial) objects and (temporal) events4 on the one hand from facts involving these things on the
other. Clyde (a physical object), his piano (another object), and Clyde's
playing his piano (an event) are all things as I am using the word "thing";
that he is playing his piano is a fact. Things are neither true nor false,
although, in the case of events, states of affairs, and conditions, we
sometimes speak of them as what makes a statement true. Facts are what
we express in making true statements about things. We describe our
awareness of facts by using a factive complement, a that-clause, after the
verb; we describe our awareness of things by using a (concrete) noun or
noun phrase as direct object of the verb. We are aware of Clyde, of his
piano, and of Clyde's playing his piano (things); we are also aware that
he is playing the piano (a fact).
Seeing, hearing, and smelling x are ways of being conscious of x.5
Seeing a tree, smelling a rose, and feeling a wrinkle is to be (perceptually)
aware (conscious) of the tree, the rose, and the wrinkle. There may be
other ways of being conscious of objects and events. It may be that
thinking or dreaming about Clyde is a way of being aware of Clyde
without perceiving him.6 I do not deny it (although I think it stretches
usage). I affirm only the converse: that to see and feel a thing is to be
(perceptually) conscious of it. And the same is true of facts: to see, smell,
or feel that P is to be (or become) aware that P. Hence,

When I speak of events I should be understood to be including any of a large assortment

of entities that occupy temporal positions (or duration): happenings, occurrences, states,
states of affairs, processes, conditions, situations, and so on. In speaking of these as temporal
entities, I do not mean to deny that they have spatial attributes - only that they do so in a
way that is derived from the objects to which they happen. Games occur in stadiums
because that is where the players are when they play the game. Movements (of a passenger,
say) occur in a vehicle because that is where the person is when she moves.
White (1964, p. 42) calls "aware" a polymorphous concept (p. 6); it takes many forms.
What it is to become or be aware of something depends on what one is aware of. To
become aware of a perceptual object takes the form of seeing or hearing or smelling or
tasting or feeling it.
One must distinguish Clyde from such things as Clyde's location, virtues, etc. One can be
aware of Clyde's location and virtues without, at the time, perceiving them. But unlike
Clyde, his virtues and location are not what I am calling things. See the later discussion of
abstract objects.

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(1) S sees (hears, etc.) x (or that P) => S is conscious of x (that P). 7

In this essay I shall be mainly concerned with perceptual forms of consciousness. So when I speak of S's being conscious (or aware) of something I will have in mind S's seeing, hearing, smelling, or in some way
sensing a thing (or fact).
Consciousness of facts implies a deployment of concepts. If S is aware
that x is F, then S has the concept F and uses (applies) it in his awareness
of x.8 If a person smells that the toast is burning, thus becoming aware
that the toast is burning, this person applies the concept burning (perhaps
also the concept toast) to what he smells. One cannot be conscious that
the toast is burning unless one understands what toast is and what it
means to burn unless, that is, one has the concepts needed to classify
objects and events in this way. I will follow the practice of supposing
that our awareness of facts takes the form of a belief. Thus, to smell that
the toast is burning is to be aware that the toast is burning is to believe
that the toast is burning. It is conventional in epistemology to assume
that when perceptual verbs take factive nominals as complements, what
is being described is not just belief but knowledge. Seeing or smelling
that the toast is burning is a way of coming to know (or, at least, verifying
the knowledge) that the toast is burning. It will be enough for present
purposes if we operate with a weaker claim: that perceptual awareness
of facts is a mental state or attitude that involves the possession and use
of concepts, the sort of cognitive or intellectual capacity involved in
thought and belief. I will, for convenience, take belief (that P) as the
normal realization of an awareness that P.
Perceptual awareness of facts has a close tie with behavior with, in
particular (for those who have language), an ability to say what one is
aware of. This is not so with a consciousness of things. One can smell
or see (hence, be conscious of) burning toast while having little or no

I will not try to distinguish direct from indirect forms of perception (and, thus, awareness).
We speak of seeing Michael Jordan on TV. If this counts as seeing Michael Jordan, then
(for purposes of this essay) it also counts as being aware or conscious of Michael Jordan (on
TV). Likewise, if one has philosophical scruples about saying one smells a rose or hears a
bell - thinking, perhaps, that it is really only scents and sounds (not the objects that give
off those scents or make those sounds) that one smells and hears then when I speak of
being conscious of a flower (by smelling) or bell (by hearing), one can translate this as
being indirectly conscious of the flower via its scent and the bell via the sound it makes.
8 Generally speaking, the concepts necessary for awareness of facts are those corresponding
to terms occurring obliquely in the clause (the that-clause) describing the fact one is aware
of.

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understanding of what toast is or what it means to burn. "What is that

strange smell?" might well be the remark of someone who smells burning toast but is ignorant of what toast is or what it means to burn
something. The cat can smell, and thus be aware of, burning toast as
well as the cook, but only the cook will be aware that the toast is
burning (or that it is the toast that is burning).
The first time I became aware of an armadillo (I saw it on a Texas
road), I did not know what it was. I did not even know what armadillos
were, much less what they looked like. My ignorance did not impair
my eyesight, of course. I saw the animal. I was aware of it ahead of me
on the road. That is why I swerved. Ignorance of what armadillos are or
of how they look can prevent someone from being conscious of certain
facts (that the object crossing the road is an armadillo) without impairing
in the slightest one's awareness of the things the armadillos crossing
roads that (so to speak) constitute these facts. This suggests the following important result. For all things (as specified earlier) x and properties
F,
(2) S is conscious of x => S is conscious that x is F.
Although (2) strikes me as self-evident, I have discovered, over the years,
that it does not strike everyone that way. The reason it does not (I have
also found) is usually connected with a failure to appreciate or apply one
or more of the following distinctions. The first two are, I hope, more
or less obvious. I will be brief. The third will take a little longer.
(a) Not Implying vs. Implying Not. There is a big difference between
denying that A implies B and affirming that A implies not-B (2) does
not affirm, it denies, an implication. It does not say that one can be
aware of a thing only by not being aware of what it is.
(b) Implication vs. Implicature. The implication (2) denies is a logical
implication, not a Gricean (1989) implicature. Saying you are aware of
an F (i.e., a thing, x, which is F) implies (as a conversational implication)
that you are aware that x, is F. Anyone who said he was conscious of
(e.g., saw or smelled) an armadillo would (normally) imply that he
thought it was an armadillo. This is true but irrelevant.
(c) Concrete Objects vs. Abstract Objects. When perceptual verbs (including the generic "aware o f and "conscious o f ) are followed by
abstract nouns (the difference, the number, the answer, the problem, the
size, the color) and interrogative nominals (where the cat is, who he is
talking to, when they left), what is being described is normally an

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awareness of some (unspecified) fact. The abstract noun phrase or interrogative nominal stands in for some factive clause. Thus, seeing (being
conscious of) the difference between A and B is to see (be conscious)
that they differ. If the problem is the clogged drain, then to be aware of
the problem is to be aware that the drain is clogged. To be aware of the
problem, it isn't enough to be aware of (e.g., to see) the thing that is
the problem (the clogged drain). One has to see (the fact) that it is
clogged. Until one becomes aware of this fact, one hasn't become aware
of the problem. Likewise, to see where the cat is hiding is to see that it
is hiding there, for some value of "there."
This can get tricky and is often the source of confusion in discussing
what can be observed. This is not the place for gory details, but I must
mention one instance of this problem since it will come up again when
we discuss which aspects of experience are conscious when we are
perceiving a complicated scene. To use a traditional philosophical example, suppose S sees a speckled hen on which there are (on the facing
side) twenty-seven speckles. Each speckle is clearly visible. Not troubling
to count, S does not realize that (hence, is not aware that) there are
twenty-seven speckles. Nonetheless, we assume that S looked long
enough, and carefully enough, to see each speckle. In such a case,
although S is aware of all twenty-seven speckles (things), he is not aware
of the number of speckles because being aware of the number of speckles
requires being aware that there is that number of speckles (a fact), and S
is not aware of this fact.9 For epistemological purposes, abstract objects
are disguised facts; you cannot be conscious of these objects without
being conscious of a fact.
(2) is a thesis about concrete objects. The values of x are things as this
was defined earlier. Abstract objects do not count as things for purposes
of (2). Hence, even though one cannot see the difference between A
and B without seeing that they differ, cannot be aware of the number of
speckles on the hen without being aware that there are twenty-seven,
and cannot be conscious of an object's irregular shape without being
conscious that it has an irregular shape, this is irrelevant to the truth of
(2).
As linguists (e.g., Lees, 1963, p. 14) observe, however, abstract nouns
may appear in copula sentences opposite both factive (that) clauses and
concrete nominals. We can say that the problem is that his tonsils are
inflamed (a fact); but we can also say that the problem is, simply, his
9

I am here indebted to Perkins's (1983, pp. 295-305) insightful discussion.

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(inflamed) tonsils (a thing). This can give rise to an ambiguity when the
abstract noun is the object of a perceptual verb. Although it is, I think,
normal to interpret the abstract noun as referring to a fact in perceptual
contexts, there exists the possibility of interpreting it as referring to a
thing. Thus, suppose that Tom at time t t differs (perceptibly) from Tom
at t2 only in having a moustache at t2. S sees Tom at both times but does
not notice the moustache is not, therefore, aware that he has grown a
moustache. Since, however, S spends twenty minutes talking to Tom in
broad daylight, it is reasonable to say that although S did not notice the
moustache, he (must) nonetheless have seen it.10 If S did see Tom's
moustache without (as we say) registering it at the time, can we describe
S as seeing, and thus (in this sense) being aware of, a difference in Tom's
appearance between ta and t2? In the factive sense of awareness (the
normal interpretation, I think), no; S was not aware that there was a
difference. S was not aware at t2 that Tom had a moustache. In the thing
sense of awareness, however, the answer is yes. S was aware of the
moustache at t2, something he was not aware of at t t , and the moustache
is a difference in Tom's appearance.
If, as in this example, "the difference between A and B" is taken to
refer not to the fact that A and B differ, but to a particular element or
condition of A and B that constitutes their difference, then seeing the
difference between A and B would be seeing this element or condition a thing, not a fact. In this thing sense of "the difference" a person or
animal who had not yet learned to discriminate (in any behaviorally
relevant way) between (say) two forms might nonetheless be said to see
(and in this sense be aware of) the difference between them if it saw the
parts of one that distinguished it from the other. When two objects
differ in this perceptible way, one can be conscious of the thing (speckle,
line, star, stripe) that is the difference without being conscious of the
difference (= conscious that they differ). In order to avoid confusion
about this critical (for my purposes) point, I will, when speaking of our
awareness or consciousness of something designated by an abstract noun
or phrase (the color, the size, the difference, the number, etc.), always
specify whether I mean thing-awareness or fact-awareness. To be thing-

10 If it helps, the reader may suppose that later, at t3, S remembers having seen Tom's
moustache at t2 while being completely unaware at the time (i.e., at t2) that Tom had a
moustache. Such later memories are not essential (S may see the moustache and never
realize he saw it), but they may, at this point in the discussion, help calm verificationists'
anxieties about the example.

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aware of a difference is to be aware of the thing (some object, event, or

condition, x) that makes the difference. To be fact-aware of the difference is to be aware of the fact that there is a difference (not necessarily
the fact that x is the difference). In the previous example, S was thingaware, but not fact-aware, of the difference between Tom at tx and t2.
He was (at t2) aware of the thing that made the difference, but not factaware (at t2 or later) of this difference.
So much by way of clarifying (2). What can be said in its support? I
have already given several examples of properties or kinds, F, that are
such that one can be aware of a thing that is F without being aware that
it is F (an armadillo, burning toast, a moustache). But (2) says something
stronger. It says that there is no property F that is such that an awareness
of a thing that is F requires an awareness of the fact that it is F. It may
be felt that this is much too strong. One can, to be sure, see armadillos
without seeing that they are armadillos, but perhaps one must, in order
to see them, see that they are (say) animals of some sort. To see x (which
is an animal) is to see that it is an animal. If this sounds implausible (one
can surely mistake an animal for a rock or a bush) maybe one must, in
seeing an object, at least see that it is an object of some sort. To be
aware of a thing is at least be aware that it is . . . how shall we say it? . . .
a thing. Something or other. Whether or not this is true depends, of course,
on what is involved in being aware that a thing is a thing. Since we can
certainly see a physical object without being aware that it is a physical
object (we can think we are hallucinating), the required concept F
(required to be aware that x is F) cannot be much of a concept. It seems
most implausible to suppose that infants and animals (presumably, conscious of things) have concepts of this sort. If the concept one must have
to be aware of something is a concept that applies to everything one can
be aware of, what is the point of insisting that one must have it to be
aware?
I therefore conclude that awareness of things (x) requires no factawareness (that x is F, for any F) of those things.11 Those who feel that
this conclusion has too little support are welcome to substitute a weaker
version of (2): namely, there is no reasonably specific property F that is such
that awareness of a thing that is F requires fact-awareness that it is F.
This will not affect my use of (2).
11 For further arguments see Dretske (1969, Ch. 2; 1979; 1981, Ch. 6) and my reply to Heil
in McLaughlin (1991, pp. 180-185).

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2. CONSCIOUS BEINGS AND CONSCIOUS STATES

Agents are said to be conscious in an intransitive sense of this word (he

regained consciousness) and in a transitive sense (he was conscious of
her). I will follow Rosenthal (1990) and refer to both as creature consciousness. Creature consciousness (whether transitive or intransitive) is
to be contrasted with what Rosenthal calls state consciousness - the
(always intransitive) sense in which certain internal states, processes,
events, and attitudes (typically in or of conscious beings) are said to be
conscious.
For purposes of being explicit about my own (standard, I hope) way
of using these words, I assume that for any x and P,
(3) S is conscious of x or that P => S is conscious (a conscious being).
That is, transitive (creature) consciousness implies intransitive (creature)
consciousness. You cannot see, hear, taste, or smell a thing without
(thereby) being conscious.12 You cannot be aware that your checkbook
doesn't balance or conscious that you are late for an appointment (a fact)
without being a conscious being.13
The converse of (3) is more problematic. Perhaps one can be conscious without being conscious of anything. Some philosophers think
that during hallucination, for example, one might be fully conscious but
(qua hallucinator) not conscious of anything. To suppose that hallucination (involving intransitive consciousness) is a consciousness of something would (or so it is feared) commit one to objectionable mental
particulars - the sense data that one hallucinates. Whether or not this is
so I will not try to say. I leave the issue open. (3) only endorses the
innocent idea that beings who are conscious of something are conscious;
it does not say that conscious beings must be conscious of something.
12 White (1964, p. 59): "Being conscious or unconscious of so and so is not the same as
simply being conscious or unconscious. If there is anything of which a man is conscious,
it follows that he is conscious; to lose consciousness is to cease to be conscious of
anything."
13 One might mention dreams as a possible exception to (3): one is (in a dream) aware of
certain things (images?) while being asleep and, therefore, unconscious in the intransitive
sense. I think this is not a genuine exception to (3), but since I do not want to get
sidetracked arguing about it, I let the possibility stand as a"possible" exception. Nothing
will depend on how the matter is decided.

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By way of interconnecting creature and state consciousness I also

posit:
(4) S is conscious of x or that P => S is in a conscious state of some sort.
Transitive creature consciousness requires state (of the creature) consciousness. S's consciousness of x or that P is a relational state of affairs;
it involves both the agent, S, and the object (or fact) S is conscious of.
The conscious state that (according to (4)) S must be in when he is
conscious of x or that P, however, is not the sort of state the existence
of which logically requires x or the condition described by P. Tokens of
this state type may be caused by x or the condition described by " P "
(and when they are, they may qualify as experiences of x or knowledge
that P), but to qualify as a token of this type, x and the condition
described by " P " are not necessary.
Thus, according to (4), when I see or hear Clyde playing the piano
(or that he is playing the piano) and (thus) am conscious of him playing
the piano (or that he is playing the piano), I am in a conscious state of
some kind. When hallucinating (or simply when listening to a recording)
I can be in the same kind of conscious state even if Clyde is not playing
the piano (or I do not perceive him playing the piano). When Clyde is
not playing the piano (or I am not perceiving him play the piano), we
speak of the conscious state in question not as knowledge (that he is
playing the piano) but as belief, not as perception (of Clyde playing the
piano) but as hallucination (or perception of something else).14
I do not know how to argue for (4). I would like to say that it states
the obvious and leave it at that. I know, however, that nothing is
obvious in this area. Not even the obvious. (4) says that our perceptual
awareness of both things (smelling the burning toast) and facts (becoming aware that it is burning) involves, in some essential way, conscious
subjective (i.e., nonrelational and, in this sense, internal or subjective)
states of the perceiver beliefs (in the case of awareness of facts) and
experiences (in the awareness of things). Not everything that happens in
or to us when we become conscious of some external object or fact is
conscious, of course. Certain events, processes, and states involved in
the processing of sensory information are presumably not conscious. But

14 For purposes of illustrating distinctions I use a simple causal theory of knowledge (to
know that P is to be caused to believe that P by the fact that P) and perception (to
perceive x is to be caused to have an experience by x). Although sympathetic to certain
versions of these theories, I wish to remain neutral here.

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something, some state or other of S, either an experience or a belief, has

to be conscious in order for S to be made conscious of the things and
facts around him. If the state of S caused by x is not a conscious state,
then the causation will not make S conscious of x. This is why one can
contract poison ivy without ever becoming aware of the plant that poisons
one. The plant causes one to occupy an internal state of some sort, yes,
but this internal state is not a conscious state. Hence, one is not (at least
not in contracting poison ivy) conscious of the plant.
David Armstrong (1980, p. 59) has a favorite example that he uses to
illustrate differences in consciousness. Some may think it tells against (4).
I think it does not. Armstrong asks one to imagine a long-distance truck
driver:
After driving for long periods of time, particularly at night, it is possible to
"come to" and realize that for some time past one has been driving without
being aware of what one has been doing. The coming-to is an alarming experience. It is natural to describe what went on before one came to by saying that
during that time one lacked consciousness. Yet it seems clear that, in the two
senses of the word that we have so far isolated, consciousness was present. There
was mental activity, and as part of that mental activity, there was perception.
That is to say, there was minimal consciousness and perceptual consciousness. If
there is an inclination to doubt this, then consider the extraordinary sophistication of the activities successfully undertaken during the period of "unconsciousness." (p. 59)
Armstrong thinks it plausible to say that the driver is conscious (perceptually) of the road, the curves, the stop signs, and so on. He sees the
road. I agree. There is transitive creature consciousness of both things
(the roads, the stop signs) and facts (that the road curves left, that the
stop sign is red, etc.). How else explain the extraordinary performance?
But does the driver thereby have, in accordance with (4), conscious
experiences of the road? Armstrong thinks there is a form of consciousness that the driver lacks. I agree. He thinks that what the driver lacks is
an introspective awareness, a perception-like awareness, of the current
states and activities of his own mind. Once again, I agree. The driver is
neither thing-aware nor fact-aware of his own mental states (including
whatever experiences he is having of the road). I am not sure that normal
people have this in normal circumstances, but I'm certainly willing to
agree that the truck driver lacks it. But where does this leave us?
Armstrong says (p. 61) that if one is not introspectively aware of a mental
state (e.g., an experience), then it (the experience) is "in one good sense

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of the word" unconscious. I disagree. The only sense in which it is

unconscious is that the person whose state it is is not conscious of having
it. But from this it does not follow that the state itself is unconscious.
Not unless one accepts a higher-order theory according to which state
consciousness is analyzed in terms of creature consciousness of the state.
Such a theory may be true, but it is by no means obvious. I shall, in
fact, argue that it is false. At any rate, such a theory cannot be invoked
at this stage of the proceedings as an objection to (4). (4) is, as it should
be, neutral about what makes the state of a person (who is transitively
conscious of x or that P) a conscious state.
I therefore accept Armstrong's example, his description of what forms
of consciousness the driver has, and the fact that the driver lacks an
important type of higher-level (introspective) consciousness of his own
mental states. What we disagree about is whether any of this implies that
the driver's experiences of the road (whatever it is in the driver that is
required to make him conscious of the road) are themselves unconscious.
We will return to that question in the final section.
Many investigators take perceptual experience and belief to be paradigmatic conscious phenomena.15 If one chooses to talk about state
consciousness (in addition to creature consciousness) at all, the clearest
and most compelling instance of it is in the domain of sensory experience and belief. My present visual experience of the screen in front of
me and my present perceptual beliefs about what is on that screen are
internal states that deserve classification as conscious if anything does. (4)
merely records a decision to regard such perceptual phenomena as central (but by no means the only) instances of conscious mental states.
Such is my justification for accepting (4). I will continue to refer to
the conscious states associated with our consciousness of things (hearing
Clyde playing the piano) as experiences and our consciousness of facts
(that he is playing the piano) as beliefs. This is, I think, fairly standard
usage. I have not, of course, said what an experience or a belief is. I
won't try. That is not my project. I am trying to say what makes (or
doesn't make) an experience conscious, not what makes it an experience.
Consciousness of things for example, seeing a stoplight turn green
requires a conscious experience of that thing. Consciousness of a fact
that the stoplight is turning green requires a conscious belief that this
is a fact. And we can have the first without the second awareness of
15 E.g., Baars (1988), Velmans (1991), Humphrey (1992).

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the stoplight's turning green without an awareness that it is turning

green - hence a conscious experience (of the light's turning green)
without a conscious belief (that it is turning green). Likewise, we can
have the second without the first a conscious belief about the stoplight,
that it is turning green, without an experience of it. Someone I trust
tells me (and I believe her) that the stoplight is turning green. So much
by way of summary of the relationships between the forms of consciousness codified in (1) through (4).
We are, I think, now in a position to answer some preliminary
questions. First: can one have conscious experiences without being conscious that one is having them? Can there, in other words, be conscious
states without the person in whom they occur being fact-aware of their
occurrence? Second: can there be conscious states in a person who is
not thing-aware of them? These are important preliminary questions
because important theories of what makes a mental state conscious,
including what passes as orthodox theory today, depend on negative
answers to one (or, in some cases, both) of these questions. If, as I
believe, the answers to both questions are affirmative, then these theories
are simply wrong.
3. EXPERIENCED DIFFERENCES REQUIRE DIFFERENT
EXPERIENCES
Glance at Figure 1 enough to assure yourself that you have seen all the
elements composing constellation Alpha (on the left) and constellation
Beta (on the right). It may be necessary to change fixation points in
order to foveate (focus on the sensitive part of the retina) all parts of

Alpha

Beta
Figure 1

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SPOT

Figure 2

Alpha and Beta. If the figure is being held at arm's length, though, this
should not be necessary, although it may occur anyway via the frequent
involuntary saccades the eyes make. A second or two should suffice.
During this brief interval some readers may have noticed the difference between Alpha and Beta. For expository purposes, I will assume
no one did. The difference is indicated in Figure 2. Call the spot, the
one that occurs in Alpha but not Beta, Spot.
According to my assumptions, then, everyone (when looking at Figure 1) saw Spot. Hence, according to (1), everyone was aware of the
thing that constitutes the difference between Alpha and Beta. According
to (4), then, everyone consciously experienced (i.e., had a conscious
experience of) the thing that distinguishes Alpha from Beta. Everyone,
therefore, was thing-aware, but not fact-aware, of the difference between Alpha and Beta. Spot, if you like, is Alpha's moustache.
Let E(Alpha) and E(Beta) stand for one's experience of Alpha and
one's experience of Beta, respectively. Alpha and Beta differ; Alpha has
Spot as a part; Beta does not. E(Alpha) and E(Beta) must also differ.
E(Alpha) has an element corresponding to (caused by) Spot. E(Beta)
does not. E(Alpha) contains or embodies, as a part, an E(Spot), an
experience of Spot, while E(Beta) does not. If it did not, then one's
experience of Alpha would have been the same as one's experience of
Beta and, hence, contrary to (4), one would not have seen Spot when
looking at Alpha.16
One can, of course, be conscious of things that differ without one's
experience of them differing in any intrinsic way. Think of seeing
16 I do not think it necessary to speculate about how E(Spot) is realized or about its exact
relation to E(Alpha). I certainly do not think E(Spot) must literally be a spatial part of
E(Alpha) in the way Spot is a spatial part of Alpha. The argument is that there is an
intrinsic difference between E(Alpha) and E(Beta). E(Spot) is just a convenient way of
referring to this difference.

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visually indistinguishable objects similar-looking thumb tacks, say. One

sees (experiences) numerically different things, but one's experience of
them is the same. Both experiences are conscious, and they are experiences of different things, but the differences in the experiences are not
conscious differences. The differences are extrinsic to the experience
itself. It is like having an experience in Chicago and another one in
New York. The numerically different experiences may be qualitatively
identical even though they have different (relational) properties - one
occurs in Chicago, the other in New York. The perception of (visually)
indistinguishable thumb tacks is like that.
The experiences of Alpha and Beta, however, are not like that. They
are qualitatively different. They differ in their relational properties, yes,
as all numerically different objects do, but they also differ in their
intrinsic properties. These two experiences are not only experiences of
qualitatively different objects (Alpha and Beta), they are experiences of
the qualitative differences. The respects in which Alpha and Beta differ
are not only visible, they are (by hypothesis) seen. One is, after all,
thing-aware of Spot, the difference between Alpha and Beta. The experiences are not distinguished in terms of their intrinsic qualities by the
person who has the experiences, of course, but that is merely to say that
there is, on the part of this person, no fact-awareness of any differences
in her experience of Alpha and her experience of Beta. That, though, is
not the issue. The question is one about differences in a person's conscious experiences, not a question about a person's awareness of differences in her experiences. It is a question about state consciousness, not a
question about creature consciousness.
Once one makes the distinction between state and creature consciousness and embraces the distinction between fact- and thingawareness, there is no reason to suppose that a person must be able to
distinguish (i.e., tell the difference between) her conscious experiences.
Qualitative differences in conscious experiences are state differences;
distinguishing these differences, on the other hand, is a fact about the
creature consciousness of the person in whom these experiences occur.
The argument assumes, of course, that if one is thing-aware of the
difference between Alpha and Beta (i.e., thing-aware of Spot), then
E(Alpha) and E(Beta) must differ. It assumes, that is, that experienced
differences require different experiences. What else could experienced
differences be? The difference between E(Alpha) and E(Beta), then, is
being taken to be the same as the difference between seeing, in broad
daylight, directly in front of your eyes, one finger raised and two fingers

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raised. Seeing the two fingers is not like seeing a flock of geese (from a
distance) where individual geese are "fused" into a whole and not seen.
In the case of the fingers, one sees both the finger on the left and the
finger on the right. Quite a different experience from seeing only the
finger on the left. When the numbers get larger, as they do with Alpha
and Beta, the experiences are no longer discernibly different to the
person having them. Given that each spot is seen, however, the experiences are, nonetheless, different. Large numbers merely make it harder
to achieve fact-awareness of the differences on the part of the person
experiencing the differences. E(Spot) is really no different than the
difference between experiencing one finger and two fingers in broad
daylight. The only difference is that in the case of Alpha and Beta there
is no fact-awareness of the thing that makes the difference.17
Since the point is critical to my argument, let me emphasize the last
point. In speaking of conscious differences in experience it is important
to remember that one need not be conscious of the difference (=
conscious that such a difference exists) in order for such differences to
exist. Readers who noticed a difference between Alpha and Beta were,
thereby, fact-aware of the difference between Alpha and Beta. Such
readers may also have become fact-aware (by inference?) of the difference between their experience of Alpha and their experience of Beta
that is, the difference between E (Alpha) and E(Beta). But readers who
were only thing-aware of the difference between Alpha and Beta were
not fact-conscious of the difference between Alpha and Beta. They were
not, therefore, fact-conscious of any difference between E(Alpha) and
E(Beta) their conscious experience of Alpha and Beta. These are
conscious differences of which no one is conscious.
In saying that the reader was conscious of Spot and, hence, in this

17 Speaking of large numbers, Elizabeth, a remarkable eidetiker (a person who can maintain
visual images for a long time) studied by Stromeyer and Psotka (1970), was tested with
computer-generated random-dot stereograms. She looked at a 10,000-dot pattern for one
minute with one eye. Then she looked at another 10,000-dot pattern with the other eye.
Some of the individual dots in the second pattern were systematically offset so that a
figure in depth would emerge (as in using a stereoscope) if the patterns from the two eyes
were fused. Elizabeth succeeded in superimposing the eidetic image that she retained from
the first pattern over the second pattern. She saw the figure that normal subjects can see
only by viewing the two patterns (one with each eye) simultaneously.
I note here that to fuse the two patterns, the individual dots seen with one eye must
somehow be paired with those retained by the brain {not the eye; this is not an afterimage) from the other eye.

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sense, the difference between Alpha and Beta without being conscious
of the fact that they differed, we commit ourselves to the possibility of
differences in conscious experience that are not reflected in conscious
belief. Consciousness of Spot requires a conscious experience of Spot, a
conscious E(Spot); yet, there is nothing in one's conscious beliefs either about Spot, about the difference between Alpha and Beta, or
about the difference between E (Alpha) and E(Beta) - that registers this
difference. What we have in such cases is internal state consciousness
with no corresponding (transitive) creature consciousness of the conscious
state.18 With no creature consciousness we lack any way of discovering,
even in our own case, that there exists this difference in conscious state. To
regard this as a contradiction is merely to confuse the way an internal
state like an experience can be conscious with the way the person who
is in that state can be, or fail to be, conscious of it.
It may be supposed that my conclusion rests on the special character
of my example. Alpha contains a numerically distinct element, Spot, and
our intuitions about what is required to see a (distinct) thing, are,
perhaps, shaping our intuitions about the character of the experience
needed to see it. Let me, therefore, borrow an example from Irvin Rock
(1983). Once again, the reader is asked to view Figure 3 (after Rock
1983, p. 54) for a second and then say which, Alpha or Beta at the
bottom, is the same as the figure shown at the top.
As closer inspection reveals, the upper left part of Alpha contains a
few wiggles found in the original but not in Beta. Experimental subjects
asked to identify which form it was they had seen did no better than
chance. Many of them did not notice that there were wiggles on the
figure they were shown. At least they could not remember having seen
them. As Rock (1983, p. 55) observes:
Taken together, these results imply that when a given region of a figure is a
nonconsequential part of the whole, something is lacking in the perception of
it, with the result that no adequate memory of it seems to be established.
No adequate memory of it is established because, I submit, at the time
the figure is seen there is no fact-awareness of the wiggles. You cannot
remember that there are wiggles on the left if you were never aware that

18 I return, in the next section, to the question of whether we might not have thingawareness of E(Spot) - that is, the same kind of awareness of the difference between
E(Alpha) and E(Beta) as we have of the difference between Alpha and Beta.

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Alpha

Beta
Figure 3

there were wiggles on the left.19 Subjects were (or may well have been)
aware (thing-aware) of the wiggles are (they saw them), but never
became aware that they were there. The wiggles are what Spot (or
Tom's moustache) is: a thing one is thing-aware of but never notices.
What is lacking in the subject's perception of the figure, then, is an
awareness of certain facts (that there are wiggles on the upper left), not
(at least not necessarily) an awareness of the things (the wiggles) on the
left.
In some minds the second example may suffer from the same defects
as the first: it exploits subtle (at least not easily noticeable) differences in
detail of the object being perceived. The differences are out there in the
objects, yes, but who can say whether these differences are registered in
here, in our experience of the objects? Perhaps our conviction (or my
conviction) that we do see (and, hence, consciously experience) these
points of detail, despite not noticing them, is simply a result of the fact
that we see figures (Alpha and Beta, for instance) between which there
are visible differences, differences that could be identified (noticed) by an
appropriate shift of attention. But just because the details are visible does
not mean that we see them or, if we do, that there must be some
intrinsic (conscious) difference in the experience of the figures that differ
in these points of detail.

19 Although there may be other ways of remembering the wiggles. To use an earlier
example, one might remember seeing Tom's moustache without (at the time) noticing it
(being fact-aware of it). Even if one cannot remember that Tom had a moustache (since
one never knew this), one can, I think, remember seeing Tom's moustache. This is the
kind of memory (episodic vs. declarative) involved in a well-known example: remembering how many windows there are in a familiar house (e.g., the house one grew up in) by
imagining oneself walking through the house and counting the windows. One does not,
in this case, remember that there were twenty-three windows, although one comes to
know that there were twenty-three windows by using one's memory.

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This is a way of saying that conscious experiences, the sorts of experiences you have when looking around the room, cannot differ unless
one is consciously aware that they differ. Nothing mental is to count as
conscious (no state consciousness) unless one is conscious of it (without
creature consciousness). This objection smacks of verificationism, but
calling it names does nothing to blunt its appeal. So I offer one final
example. It will, of necessity, come at the same point in a more indirect
way. I turn to perceptually salient conditions, conditions it is hard to
believe are not consciously experienced. In order to break the connection between experience and belief, between thing-awareness and factawareness, then, I turn to creatures with a diminished capacity for factawareness.20
Eleanor Gibson (1969, p. 284), in reporting Kluver's studies with
monkeys, describes a case in which the animals are trained to the larger
of two rectangles. When the rectangles are altered in size, the monkeys
continue to respond to the larger of the two whatever their absolute
size happens to be. In Kluver's words, they "abstract" the LARGER
THAN relation. After they succeed in abstracting this relation, and
when responding appropriately to the larger (A) of two presented rectangles (A and B), we can say that they are aware of A, aware of B (thingawareness), and aware that A is larger than B (fact-awareness). Some
philosophers may be a little uncomfortable about assigning beliefs to
monkeys in these situations, uncomfortable about saying that the monkey is aware that A is larger than B, but let that pass. The monkeys at
least exhibit a differential response, and that is enough. How shall we
describe the monkeys' perceptual situation before they learned to abstract
this relation? Did the rectangles look different to the monkeys? Was there
any difference in their experience of A and B before they became aware
that A was larger than B? We can imagine the difference in size to be as
great as we please. They were not fact-aware of the difference, not
aware that A is larger than B, to be sure. But that isn't the question. The
question is: were they conscious of the condition of A and B that, so to
speak, makes it true that A is larger than B?21 Does their experience of

20 The following is an adaptation of the discussion in Dretske (1981, pp. 151-152).

21 Conditions, recall, are things in my sense of this word. One can be aware of an object's
condition (its movement, for instance) without being aware that it is moving. This is what
happens when one sees an adjacent vehicle's movement as one's own movement or an
object's movement as an expansion or contraction. It is also what occurs in infants and,
perhaps, animals who do not have the concept of movement: they are aware of O's
movement, but not aware that O is moving.

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objects change when, presented with two objects, the same size, one of
these objects expands, making it much larger than the other? If not, how
could these animals ever learn to do what they are being trained to do
distinguish between A's being larger than B and A's not being larger
than B?
It seems reasonable to suppose that, prior to learning, the monkeys
were thing-aware of a difference that they became fact-aware of only
after learning was complete. Their experience of A and B was different,
consciously so, before they were capable of exhibiting this difference in
behavior. Learning of this sort is simply the development of factawareness from thing-awareness.
The situation becomes even more compelling if we present the monkeys with three rectangles and try to get them to abstract the INTERMEDIATE IN SIZE relation. This more difficult problem proves capable of solution by chimpanzees, but monkeys find it extremely difficult.
Suppose monkey M cannot solve it. What shall we say about M's
perceptual condition when he sees three rectangles, A, B, and C, of
descending size. If we use behavioral criteria for what kind of facts M is
conscious of and assume that M has already mastered the first abstraction
(the LARGER THAN relation), M is aware of the three rectangles, A,
B, and C. M is also aware that A is larger than B, that B is larger than
C, and that A is larger than C. M is not, however, aware that B is
INTERMEDIATE IN SIZE even though this is logically implied by
the facts he is aware of. Clearly, although M is not (and, apparently,
cannot be made) aware of the fact that B is intermediate in size, he is
nonetheless aware of the differences (A's being larger than B. B's being
larger than C) that logically constitute the fact that he is not aware of.
B's being intermediate in size is a condition the monkey is thing-aware
of but cannot be made fact-aware of. There are conscious features of the
animal's experiences that are not registered in the animal's fact-awareness
and, hence, not evinced in the animal's deliberate behavior.
4. WHAT, THEN, MAKES EXPERIENCES CONSCIOUS?
We have just concluded that there can be conscious differences in a
person's experience of the world and, in this sense, conscious features
of her experience of which that person is not conscious. If this is true,
then it cannot be a person's awareness of a mental state that makes that
state conscious. E(Spot) is conscious, and it constitutes a conscious difference between E(Alpha) and E(Beta) even though no one, including

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the person in whom it occurs, is conscious of it. It follows, therefore,

that what makes a mental state conscious cannot be our consciousness of
it. If we have conscious experiences, beliefs, desires, and fears, it cannot
be our introspective awareness of them that makes them conscious.
This conclusion is a bit premature. The argument mounted in 3 was
primarily directed at higher-order-thought (HOT) theories that take an
experience or a belief (mental states) to be conscious in virtue of their
being the object of some HOT-like entity, a higher-order mental state
that (like a thought) involves the deployment of concepts. My concern
in 3, therefore, was to show that conscious experience required no
fact-awareness either of facts related to what one experiences (e.g.,
Spot) or of facts related to the experience itself (e.g., E(Spot). One does
not have to be fact-aware of E(Spot) in order for E(Spot) to be conscious.
This leaves the possibility, however, that in order for one's experience
of Spot to be conscious, one must be thing-aware of it. Perhaps, that is,
E(Spot) is conscious, not because there is some higher-order thought
(involving concepts) about E(Spot), but rather because there is a higherorder experience (a nonconceptual mental state) of E(Spot), something
that makes one thing-aware of E(Spot) in the same way one is thingaware (perceptually) of Spot. This is a form of the H O T theory that
Lycan (1992, p. 216) describes as Locke's "inner sense" account of state
consciousness. What makes an experience conscious is not one's (fact)
awareness that one is having it, but one's (thing) awareness of it.
To my mind, Rosenthal (1990, pp. 34ff.) makes a convincing case
against this "inner sense" version of state consciousness. He points out,
for example, that one of the respects in which experiences are unlike
thoughts is in having a sensory quality to them. E(Alpha), for instance,
has visual, not auditory or tactile, qualities. If what made E(Alpha) into
a conscious experience was some higher-order experience of E(Alpha),
one would expect some distinctive qualia of this higher-order experience
to intrude. But all one finds are the qualia associated with E(Alpha), the
lower-order experience. For this reason (among others) Rosenthal Lmiself prefers a version of the inner spotlight theory of consciousness in
which the spotlight is something in the nature of a f^ct-awareness, not
thing-awareness, of the lower-order mental state or activity.
Aside, though, from the merits of such specific objections, I think the
inner sense approach loses all its attraction once the distinction between
thing-awareness and fact-awareness is firmly in place. Notice, first, that
if it is thing-awareness of a mental state that is supposed to make that

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mental state conscious, then the inner sense theory has no grounds for
saying that E(Spot) is not conscious. For a person might well be thingaware of E(Spot) - thus making E(Spot) conscious -just as he is thingaware of Spot, without ever being fact-aware of it. So on this version of
the spotlight theory, a failure to realize, a total unawareness of the fact
that there is a difference between E(Alpha) and E(Beta), is irrelevant to
whether there is a conscious difference between these two experiences.
This being so, the inner sense theory of what makes a mental state
conscious does nothing to improve one's epistemic access to one's own
conscious states. As far as one can tell, E(Spot) (just like Spot) may as well
not exist. What good is an inner spotlight, an introspective awareness of
mental events, if it doesn't give one epistemic access to the events on
which it shines? The inner sense theory does nothing to solve the
problem of what makes E(Spot) conscious. On the contrary, it multiplies
the problems by multiplying the facts of which we are not aware. We
started with E(Spot) and gave arguments in support of the view that
E(Spot) was conscious even though the person in whom it occurred was
not fact-aware of it. We are now being asked to explain this fact by
another fact of which we are not fact-aware: namely, the fact that we
are thing-aware of E(Spot). Neither E(Spot) nor the thing-awareness of
E(Spot) makes any discernible difference to the person in whom they
occur. This, surely, is a job for Occam's razor.
If we do not have to be conscious of a mental state (like an experience) for the mental state to be conscious, then, it seems, consciousness
of something cannot be what it is that makes a thing conscious. Creature
consciousness (of either the factive or thing form) is not necessary for
state consciousness.22 What, then, makes a mental state conscious? When
S smells, and thereby becomes aware of, the burning toast, what makes
his experience of the burning toast a conscious experience? When S
becomes aware that the light has turned green, what makes his belief
that the light has turned green a conscious belief?
This is the big question, of course, and I am not confronting it in this
essay. I am concerned only with a preliminary issue a question about
the relationship (or lack thereof) between creature consciousness and
state consciousness. For it is the absence of this relation (in the right
form) that undermines the orthodox view that what makes certain men22

Neither is it sufficient. We are conscious of a great many internal states and activities that
are not themselves conscious (heartbeats, a loose tooth, hiccoughs of a fetus, a cinder in
the eye).

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tal states conscious is one's awareness of them. Nonetheless, although I

lack the space (and, at this stage, the theory) to answer the big question,
I would like to indicate, if only briefly, the direction in which these
considerations lead.
What makes an internal state or process conscious is the role it plays
in making one (intransitively) conscious normally, the role it plays in
making one (transitively) conscious of some thing or fact. An experience
of x is conscious not because one is aware of the experience, or aware
that one is having it, but because, being a certain sort of representation,
it makes one aware of the properties (of x) and objects (x itself) of which
it is a (sensory) representation. My visual experience of a barn is conscious not because I am introspectively aware of it (or introspectively
aware that I am having it), but because it (when brought about in the
right way) makes me aware of the barn. It enables me to perceive the
barn. For the same reason, a certain belief is conscious not because the
believer is conscious of it (or conscious of having it23), but because it is
a representation that makes one conscious of the fact (that P) that it is a
belief about. Experiences and beliefs are conscious not because you are
conscious of them, but because, so to speak, you are conscious with
them.
This is not to deny that one may, in fact, be conscious of one's own
experiences in the way one is, in ordinary perception, conscious of barns
and other people. Perhaps we are equipped with an introspective faculty,
some special internal scanner, that takes as its objects (the xs it is an
awareness of), one's experiences of barns and people. Perhaps this is so.
Perhaps introspection is a form of metaspectation a sensing of one's
own sensing of the world. I doubt this. I think introspection is best
understood not as thing-awareness, but as fact-awareness - an awareness
that one has certain beliefs, thoughts, desires, and experiences without a
corresponding awareness of the things (the beliefs, thoughts, desires, and
experiences) themselves. Introspection is more like coming to know (be
aware) that one has a virus than it is like coming to see, hear, or feel
(i.e., be aware of) the virus (the thing) itself.
Whether these speculations on the nature of introspection are true or
not, however, is independent of the present thesis about consciousness.

23 If fact-awareness was what made a belief conscious, it would be very hard for young
children (those under the age of three or four years, say) to have conscious beliefs. They
don't yet have a firm grasp of the concept of a belief and are, therefore, unaware of the
fact that they have beliefs. See Flavell (1988) and Wellman (1990).

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The claim is not that we are unaware of our own conscious beliefs and
experiences (or unaware that we have them). It is, instead, that our
being aware of them, or that we have them, is not what makes them
conscious. What makes them conscious is the way they make us conscious of something else the world we live in and (in proprioception)
the condition of our own bodies.
Saying just what the special status is that makes certain internal representations conscious while other internal states (lacking this status)
remain unconscious is, of course, the job for a fully developed theory of
consciousness. I haven't supplied that. All I have tried to do is to indicate
where not to look for it.
REFERENCES

Armstrong, D. M. 1968: A Materialist Theory of the Mind. London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul.
1980: The Nature of Mind and Other Essays. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press.
Astington, J., P. Harris, and D. Olson, eds. 1988: Developing Theories of the Mind.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Baars, B. 1988: A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dennett, D. C. 1991: Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Dretske, F. 1969: Seeing and Knowing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1978: "The role of the percept in visual cognition," in Savage 1978, pp. 107
127.
1979: "Simple seeing," in Gustafson and Tapscott 1979, pp. 1-15.
1981: Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press/
A Bradford Book.
1990: "Seeing, believing and knowing," in Osherson, Kosslyn, and Hollerback
1990.
Flavell, J. H. 1988: "The development of children's knowledge about the mind:
From cognitive connections to mental representations," in Astington, Harris,
and Olson 1988.
Gibson, E. 1969: Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development. N e w York: Apple-

ton-Century-Crofts.
Grice, P. 1989: Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
Gustafson, D. F., and B. L. Tapscott, eds. 1979: Body, Mind and Method: Essays in
Honor of Virgil Aldrich. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Humphrey, N . 1992: A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness.

New York: Simon and Schuster.

Lees, R. B. 1963: The Grammar of English Nominalizations. Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press.

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Lycan, W. 1987: Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press/A Bradford

Book.
1992: "Uncertain materialism and Lockean introspection." Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 15.2, pp. 216-217.
McLaughlin, B., ed. 1991: Critical Essays on the Philosophy of Fred Dretske. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
Milner, A. D., & M. D. Rugg, eds. 1992: The Neuropsychology of Consciousness.
London: Academic Press.
Osherson, D., S. Kosslyn, and J. Hollerback, eds. 1990: An Invitation to Cognitive
Science, Volume 2, Visual Cognition and Action. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press/A Bradford Book.
Perkins, M. 1983: Sensing the World. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company.
Rock, I. 1983: The Logic of Perception. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press/A
Bradford Book.
Rosenthal, D. 1986: "Two concepts of consciousness." Philosophical Studies 94.3,
pp.329-359.
1990: "A theory of consciousness." Report No. 40, Research Group on Mind
and Brain, ZiF, University of Bielefeld.
Rosenthal, D. 1991: "The independence of consciousness and sensory quality," in
Villanueva 1991, pp. 15-36.
Savage, W., ed. 1978: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Perception and
Cognition, Vol. IX. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Stromeyer, C. F., & J. Psotka 1970: "The detailed texture of eidetic images." Nature
225, pp. 346-349.
Velmans, M. 1991: "Is human information processing conscious?" Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 14.4, pp. 651-668.
Villanueva, E., ed. 1991: Consciousness. Atascadero, California: Ridgeview Publishing
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Wellman, H. M. 1990: The Child's Theory of the Mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts;
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White, A. R. 1964: Attention, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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8
Differences That Make No
Difference1

Never mind differences that make no difference. There are none. I want
to talk, instead, about differences that do not make a difference to anyone,
differences of which no one is aware. There are lots of these.
According to Daniel Dennett, though, there are fewer than you
might have thought. There are, to be sure, physical differences even
some that exist in you of which you are not aware. There are also
conscious events in me, and differences among them, that you don't
know about. But there are no conscious events in you that escape your
attention. If you do not believe yourself to be having conscious experience ((), then <|) is not a conscious experience at all. Dennett calls this
view, a view that denies the possibility in principle of consciousness in
the absence of a subject's belief in that consciousness, first-person operationalism.2 Dennett is a first-person operationalist. For him there are no
facts about one's own conscious life no, as it were, conscious facts of which one is not conscious.
Philosophers like to call each other names. I'm no exception. The
preferred term of abuse these days, especially among materialists, seems
to be "Cartesian." So I will use it. First-person operationalism sounds
like warmed-over Cartesianism to me. For Descartes, the mind is an
open book. Everything that happens there is known to be happening
there by the person in whom it is happening. No mental secrets. For
Dennett, too, there are no secrets, no facts about our conscious lives

Reprinted from Philosophical Topics 22 (1 and 2) (Spring and Fall 1994), 4157, by permission of the publisher.
1 I am grateful to Giiven Giizeldere for many helpful suggestions.
2 D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991), 132.

138

that are not available for external publication. Differences that make no
difference to the publicity department, to what a person knows or
believes and can thus exhibit in overt behavior, are not conscious differences.
The mind is like everything else: There is more to it than we are
aware. If making a difference to someone is understood, as Dennett
understands it, as a matter of making a difference to what that person
believes or judges, then conscious differences need make no difference
to anyone not even to the person in whom they occur.
1. HIDE THE THIMBLE
From Content and Consciousness2' to Consciousness Explained, a span of

over twenty years, Dennett has been resolute in his conviction that
awareness of something an apple or a thimble - requires some kind of
cognitive upshot. In the 1969 book (chapter six, "Awareness and Consciousness"), this is expressed as the idea that awareness of an apple on a
table is awareness that there is an apple on a table. Awareness that there
is an apple on a table, in turn, gets cashed out 4 as a content-bearing
internal state like a judgment or a belief that controls behavior and (for
those who can speak) speech. In 1991, the same view is expressed by
saying that Betsy, who is looking for a thimble in the children's game
"Hide the Thimble," does not see the thimble until she "zeros in on"
it and identifies it as a thimble. Only when an appropriate judgment is
made "Aha, the thimble" will she see it. Only then will she become
aware of it. Only then will the thimble be "in" Betsy's conscious
experience.
As a historical note, the same year Content and Consciousness appeared,
I published Seeing and Knowing.5 Although I was concerned primarily
with epistemological issues, how seeing gives rise to knowing, I made a
great fuss about what I called nonepistemic perception, perception that
does not require (although in adult human beings it is normally accompanied by) belief or knowledge. In contrast to seeing facts {that they are
apples and thimbles), seeing objects (apples and thimbles) is a case of
nonepistemic perception. I made a fuss about nonepistemic perception
because so many bad arguments in epistemology (and, at that time, in
3
4
5

Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).
Ibid., 118.
F. Dretske, Seeing and Knowing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

139

the philosophy of science) were pivoting on a confusion between the

perception of objects and events (like oscilloscopes and eclipses), on the
one hand, and the perception of facts (that they are oscilloscopes and
eclipses), on the other. The perception of objects and events, I argued,
could, and often did (especially in the case of children, animals, and
theoretically untutored adults), occur in the absence of conceptual uptake without such propositional attitudes as knowledge, identification,
belief, and recognition. When it comes to objects and events, seeing is
not knowing, and it isn't believing either.
At the same time, therefore, that I was arguing that awareness of
apples was quite distinct from awareness that they are apples or, indeed,
awareness of any fact about the apples, Dennett was assuming that these
were essentially the same thing, that awareness of things is awareness of
facts about those things.6
Although Dennett's book was, in many ways, an absolute eye-opener
for me (awakening my interest in the philosophy of mind), we were
obviously in disagreement about a fundamental point concerning perceptual consciousness and, therefore, the nature of perceptual experience. Since the perception of objects and events was, for me, a relation
between a perceiver and a thing that could exist without the perceiver's
understanding what was being perceived or even that something was
being perceived perception could not be understood in terms of
judgment, belief, or knowledge. Cognitively speaking, seeing is like
touching, a relationship between a person (or animal) and an object that
can exist (although it normally does not exist) without identification or
recognition. One does not need the concept of a thimble - does not
need to understand what a thimble is to touch it. Neither does one
need the concept of a thimble to see a thimble. This, by the way, is why

Since I have just introduced the term "awareness" and will shortly be talking about
consciousness, I should perhaps take this opportunity to register a point about usage. I take
seeing, hearing, tasting, etc., an object or event, X, to be ways of being (perceptually)
aware of X. I assume the same with factive clauses: To see or smell that P that the toast
is burning, for example - is to be (perceptually) aware that P. I also follow what I take to
be standard usage and take perceptual awareness of X (or that P) to be a form - in fact, a
paradigmatic form - of consciousness (of either X or that P). This is what T. Natsoulas
("Consciousness," American Psychologist 33 [1978]: 904914) calls "consciousness 3," and
he describes this as our most basic concept of consciousness. It should also be evident that
I use the verbs "aware" and "conscious" interchangeably. There are some subtle differences
between these verbs (see A. R. White's Attention [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964]), but I
don't think any of these nuances bear on the disagreement between Dennett and me. So I
ignore them.

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the context "S sees . . ." is referentially transparent.7 If S sees X, and X

= Y, then S sees Y. Compare: If S touches X, and X = Y, then S
touches Y. Of course, many of the objects we see every day are objects
we identify in some way or another. But this is also true of the objects
we touch. I don't always, but I often know what I'm touching. I do not
normally touch thimbles and apples without knowing what I'm touching. The same is true of perception. I do not always, but I often know
what I'm seeing especially so when I see familiar objects at close range
in good light. But that isn't the point. The point is not what is usually
true of the objects one sees and touches, but what must be true to see
and touch them, what it is that constitutes the seeing and touching.
Knowledge, belief, recognition, judgment, identification none of this
is necessary.8
In view of Paul Grice's work on conversational implicatures,9 I hope
it is not necessary to mention (I'll do it anyway) the irrelevance of what
we would say (or deny) we saw or touched. I would not normally say I
saw, touched, or stepped on a thimble unless I thought I saw, touched,
or stepped on a thimble unless I recognized or identified (as a thimble)
what I saw, touched, or stepped on. None of this is relevant to what it
takes to see, touch, or step on a thimble. And I would be quick to deny
that I saw a thimble if I returned empty-handed from a search for a
thimble through a cluttered drawer. The denial is conversationally appropriate and perfectly reasonable, not to mention informative to my
impatient wife, even when it is false. I did see it; I just failed to recognize
it at least as a thimble. What I imply, and therefore, the information I
succeed in communicating with this false statement is, of course, that I
did not find (identify, recognize) the thimble. As so often happens in
communication, listeners are more interested in the implied truths than
in the false statements that imply them.

In calling this a referentially transparent context, I mean to restrict the values of "X" and
"Y" to noun phrases referring to specific objects and events (e.g., "the apple on the table,"
"the thimble on the mantle"). When interrogative nominals (what X is, who X is, where
X is), factive clauses (that it is X), and abstract nouns (the difference, the pattern, the
problem, the answer) follow the perceptual verb, the context is no longer transparent.
8 As certain forms of agnosia testify: "Associative agnosia is also often taken to be a more
specific syndrome, in which patients have a selective impairment in the recognition of
visually presented objects, despite apparently adequate visual perception of them" (M.J.
Farah, Visual Agnosia [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990], 57).
9 P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," in P. Cole and J. Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics
(New York: Academic Press, 1975).

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In a footnote in Consciousness Explained,10 Dennett asks whether identification of a thimble conies after or before becoming conscious of it.
He tells us that his Multiple Drafts model of consciousness "teaches us"
not to ask this question. One can understand why he wouldn't want to
ask this question and, therefore, why he would favor a theory that did
not let one ask it. He doesn't want to hear the answer. Are we really
being told that it makes no sense to ask whether one can see, thus be
aware of, thus be conscious of, objects before being told what they are?
Does it make no sense to ask, Macbeth style, "What is this I see before
me?"
That it does make sense seemed obvious to me in 1969. It still does.
Frankly, I thought when Dennett read my book it would seem obvious
to him. Apparently it didn't. Maybe he didn't read the book. Whatever
the explanation, he is still convinced that seeing is a form of knowing
(or believing or taking see later), that being conscious of a (j) is being
conscious that it is a (j).11
I remain convinced that as long as these perceptual attitudes seeing
objects and seeing facts, being aware of apples and being aware that they
are apples are conflated, it is hard (to be honest, I think it is impossible)
to give a plausible theory of consciousness. One has already suppressed
one of the most distinctive elements of our conscious life the difference
between experience and belief.
2. ANIMALS AND INFANTS

Cats and birds can see thimbles as well as (probably better than) little
girls. They have better eyesight. The department in which little girls
surpass birds and cats is in the conceptual department: They know, while

10 Consciousness Explained, 335.

11 Given his commitment to the view that all seeing is seeing-that, I do not understand
Dennett's reaction to the work of Anne Treisman. In "Time and the Observer: The
Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain" (The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15
[1992]: 335, n. 8), Dennett and (coauthor) M. Kinsbourne say that Treisman has conducted important experiments to support her claim that seeing should be distinguished
from identifying. I didn't think experiments were needed to establish this. Are experiments also needed to establish that touching X should be distinguished from identifying X?
Aside from the issue of whether experiments are needed, though, I am puzzled as to why
Dennett, who thinks seeing thimbles is identifying thimbles, believes Treisman's experiments support the view that seeing should be distinguished from identifying. Are we to
conclude that he thinks Treisman's important experiments are a failure? Has he told her
about this?

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cats and birds do not, what thimbles are. They know that, other things
being equal, things that look like that are thimbles. When they see things
that look like that, then they can judge them to be, identify them as,
take them to be, thimbles. They can, as a result, not only see thimbles,
but, when they are attentive and the thimbles are not too far away, see
that they are thimbles something quite beyond the capacity of birds
and cats. This, though, is no reason to deny that animals can see thimbles. That would be to confuse ignorance with blindness.
In replying to criticisms by Lockwood and Fellows and O'Hear,
Dennett questions the "methodological assumption" that animals and
infants are conscious.12 Whether or not infants and animals are conscious, he declares, has no clear pretheoretical meaning. What Dennett
is doing here, of course, is recapitulating Descartes's answer to Arnauld.
Holding that all conscious phenomena are thoughtlike in character,
Descartes concluded that animals, lacking the power of thought, could
not be perceptually conscious of anything. If sheep seem to see the
wolves from whom they run, the appearances are deceptive. Such flight
is an unconscious reflex to retinal stimulation.
Dennett is no Cartesian, but he does, like Descartes, have a theory of
consciousness to which conceptually impoverished animals (and infants)
are an embarrassment.13 How can a bird who cannot take a thimble to
be a thimble, cannot judge, believe, think (let alone say) that something
is a thimble, see a thimble? How can sheep be aware of wolves if they
cannot judge them to be wolves? Descartes's bold way out of this
problem was to deny that animals were conscious of anything. Dennett's
way out - not quite so bold is to insist that it isn't clear that animals
(not to mention infants) are conscious of anything. For dialectical purposes, though, the result is the same: Embarrassing counterexamples are
neutralized. One cannot use the fact obvious to most of us that
animals can see to argue that seeing is not believing.
For the sake of joining issues, I am willing to defer to Dennett's
judgments about what is, and what isn't, clear in this area, but I have my
suspicions about what is shaping his convenient intuitions on this matter.
It wasn't so long ago, after all, that this, or something very like this, was

12 Dennett, "Living on the Edge," Inquiry 36 (1993): 144-145.

13 Other theories of consciousness in particular the so-called Higher-Order Thought
(HOT) theory according to which an experience is not conscious unless one thinks
(judges, knows) one is having it - also seem driven to deny consciousness to animals. See,
e.g., Peter Carruthers, "Brute Experience," The Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 258-269.

143

clear to Dennett. In Consciousness Explained he said that "birds and fish

and reptiles and insects clearly [!] have color vision, rather like our
'trichromatic' (red-green-blue) system."14 If Dennett still believes this,
one is left to conclude that he thinks color vision doesn't enable an
animal to see colors. Either that or seeing colors is not a way of being
aware of colors. Or, perhaps, that being aware of colors does not require
consciousness.
There is the further fact, as Dennett himself points out in Consciousness Explained,15 that according to his own theory,16 lower animals (including frogs) have beliefs and wants (he adds that there is no good
reason for putting these words in quotation marks). Since perceptions
are also part of the intentional stance, lower animals presumably have
perceptions too. Is one to infer, then, that the intentional stance entitles
one to attribute perceptual beliefs about X to animals but not perceptual
awareness of X? Why? Why go skittish about this part of the intentional
stance?
It isn't only pet owners (and new parents) who will strenuously
disagree with Dennett's treatment of animals and infants. I think scientists who make it their business to study animals will too. Horn is typical:
The evidence available, mainly from studies of the visual abilities of vertebrates,
including macaques, rats, chickens and pigeons . . . gives no support to the view
that the visual capacities of these animals resemble those of humans with blindsight, and no reason, therefore, to infer that these animals are unaware of the
stimuli to which they respond.17
3. COGNITIVISM
Cognitivists (as I call them) are people who interpret perception, including the perception of thimbles and wolves, as some form of cognitive or
conceptual achievement, as a species of identifying, knowing, judging,
recognizing, taking, or believing. All awareness-of is awareness-that, all
seeing is seeing-as. Sensations are minithoughts. Hence, following Descartes, if one cannot think, one cannot feel or experience. The ignorant,
the ones who cannot think the appropriate thoughts, are thereby ren-

14 Consciousness Explained, 377.

15 Ibid., 194.
16 At least the theory set forth in The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).
17 G. Horn, "What Can the Bird Brain Tell Us about Thought without Language?" in L.
Weiskrantz, ed., Thought without Language (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988).

144

dered unconscious. Confronted with examples of perception that do not

involve recognition, cognitivists typically give ground by diluting the
cognitive requirements of perception. Quantifiers are shuffled. Although
there is nothing in particular you must see something as in order to see
it, you must, in order to see it, see it as something or other. Although
you can see a thimble without seeing that it is a thimble, without taking
it to be a thimble, you must, in order to see it, at least take it to be
something in Granny's sewing basket or, maybe, just a shiny thing up
there on the mantle. This maneuver has the welcome result of allowing
people who are ignorant of thimbles to see them, but it still requires too
much. It has the unwelcome result of making noticing forming beliefs
about a thimble necessary for seeing a thimble. Even if one doesn't
balk at this (some people, I know, don't), there is the fact that people
can see objects without believing they are seeing anything. People have
seen things when they thought they were hallucinating or imagining
when they took themselves to be seeing nothing at all.18 If some hallucinations are similar enough to veridical perception to convince the
hallucinator that he is really seeing something, then, by parity of reasoning, they are similar enough to convince some perceivers that they are
hallucinating. Hence, perceiving physical objects, including thimbles,
must be possible without believing one is perceiving anything while,
in fact, believing one is perceiving nothing. If seeing really is believing,
it is hard to see what the beliefs are supposed to be.19
This debate has a long and undistinguished history. I will not try to
summarize it here. I merely intend to locate Dennett within a certain
tradition, a tradition that seeks to understand sensory phenomena in
cognitive or conceptual terms. The motives for this assimilation in current philosophy of mind are usually functional (Consciousness Explained
defends "a version of functionalism").20 Beliefs, as behavior-dedicated
mental states, are, in principle, detectable in the behavior of the organism
in which they occur. Given the game she is playing, Betsy's belief that
the object she sees is a thimble will result in her sitting down. From a

18 A well-known experimental demonstration of this is C. W. Perky, "An Experimental

Study of Imagination," in D. C. Beardslee and M. Wertheimer, eds., Readings in Perception
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958).
19 One could insist that in order to see a thimble one must at least believe that it is something
or other, where that is meant to include figments of one's own imagination. Philosophers
are capable of defending almost anything, I know, but this doesn't sound like a move that
Daniel Dennett would be happy to make. So I ignore it.
20 Consciousness Explained, 31.

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functionalist's point of view, then, it would be convenient if Betsy's

thimble-sightings were Betsy's thimble-beliefs. For then Betsy's thimblesightings would (together with her desires) have behavioral relevance.
We could tell, from the outside, that she saw the thimble. If, on the
other hand, there could be thimble-sightings without thimble-beliefs, if
Betsy could experience a thimble without realizing it, then good grief!
- how could we ever find out she saw a thimble? How could Betsy ever
find out she saw a thimble?21 What possible functional role would
thimble-sightings have? If the difference between seeing a thimble and
not seeing a thimble is going to make a difference to anyone, the
cognitivist concludes, it had better be identified with a difference between taking and not taking between judging and not judging an
object to be a thimble.
David Armstrong is a cognitivist who has long appreciated the problems inherent in telling this kind of story about sense experience, the
problem of analyzing how things seem in terms of belief and judgment.
The problem, as he put it in his 1968 book,22 is that there is, quite
simply, perception without either belief or the acquiring of belief. After
citing some examples he concludes:
All these cases seem to show that we ought to make a distinction between
the beliefs that we acquire in perception, and the perceptual experience on
which these beliefs are based.23
Armstrong makes the distinction, but he prefers to do so by assimilating
perceptual experience to perceptual belief. Experiences are inclinations
to believe or what Armstrong calls potential beliefs beliefs we would
have if we did not have certain other beliefs. Adapting Armstrong's
analysis to the thimble example, we get something like this: Betsy's
seeing a thimble is Betsy's acquiring a potential belief, a physical event
in her brain that would be a belief if certain other beliefs didn't interfere.
This does not seem like much progress. Armstrong's potential beliefs
are as elusive as are the experiences they are meant to replace. How
21 The answer to this question, an answer that cognitivists tend to overlook, is: Ask someone!
Other people may be able to supply information that, together with what you already
know, helps you to discover what (or who) you saw. The way I tell I saw Harold's cousin
last night is to ask Harold whether his cousin was at the party I attended last night. What
does he look like, where was he standing, when did he arrive? Was he in that crowd of
people I was watching? If so, I must have seen him.
22 D. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (New York: Humanities Press, 1968).
23 From an excerpt in J. Dancy, ed., Perceptual Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 134.

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does one tell that Betsy had a potential belief that some object was a
thimble (or whatever potential belief an experience of the thimble is
supposed to be)? How does Betsy tell she has one? In observing a crowd
of people or a shelf full of books, does one have a potential belief for
each (visible) person and book? The difference between having a potential belief and having no belief at all sounds like a difference that doesn't
make a difference. Potential beliefs about thimbles seem to be "cognitions" one can have without knowing one has them. Why trade experiences one can have without knowing it for cognitions one can have
without knowing it?
George Pitcher is another cognitivist who understands the problems
in accounting for sense experience.24 Realizing that X can look red to S
without S's consciously believing that X is red, Pitcher identifies Xs
looking red with an unconscious belief state.25 In order to account for
the "richness" of perceptual consciousness seeing a red ball among a
cluster of other colored objects the belief state with which the "look"
of things is identified is said to be a large set of such unconscious
beliefs.26 Finally, for the person who mistakenly thinks he is experiencing
an illusion, a person who sees an oasis before him when he consciously
believes that there is no oasis before him and that nothing there in the
desert even looks like an oasis,27 Pitcher resorts28 to suppressed, or
"partially" or "mostly" suppressed, inclinations to believe. According to
this way of talking, Betsy's thimble-sightings turn out to be her thimblecaused-suppressed-inclinations-to-believe.
Once again, it is hard to see what is gained by these verbal maneuvers.
The difference between a visual experience and a belief about what you
experience seems reasonably clear pretheoretically. Why must the distinction be rendered in quasi-cognitive terms especially when this
results in the awkward identification of conscious experience with unconscious beliefs and inclinations? After all the huffing and puffing, we
are left with a difference that doesn't make a difference to anyone. So
why bother?
Dennett, working within this tradition, has his own philosophically
"correct" way of talking about perceptual experiences. In "Time and

24
25
26
27
28

G. Pitcher, A Theory of Perception (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971).

Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 72.
Ibid., 83.
Ibid., 93.

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the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain,"29

Dennett and Kinsbourne talk about microjudgments and micro takings.
Microjudgments are "sort of like" judgments or decisions.30 They are
contentful states or discriminations31 that are the multiple drafts and
narrative fragments of Consciousness Explained. These judgments, decisions, drafts, narrative fragments, contentful states, registrations, interpretations, and discriminations (all these terms are used) are sort of like
judgments in much the same way that Armstrong's potential beliefs were
sort of like real beliefs and Pitcher's suppressed inclinations were sort of
like real inclinations. The persons in whom they occur need never
know, need never be aware, that they are taking place. This, presumably, is why these contentful states, these decisions and discriminations,
are labeled "micro" a prefix that does exactly the work of "unconscious." There can be microjudgments in S that X is so-and-so without
S ever judging that Xis so-and-so. There can be contentful discriminations in 5 of X from Y without S consciously discriminating X from Y.
That, apparently, is why Dennett speaks of cells and circuits in people,
not people themselves, as making microjudgments.32 The job of Dennett's micro "cognitions" and multiple "drafts" is to do precisely what
potential or suppressed "beliefs" do for Armstrong and Pitcher: provide
a cognitive rug under which to sweep conscious experience.33
Philosophers are free to use words as they please. As long as one is
clear about what microjudgments are, there is, I suppose, no harm in
describing Betsy's nervous system, when she sees a thimble, as swarming
with microjudgments about all manner of topics. But if we choose to
talk this way, then we must also be prepared to say that, in the same
sense, automobile fuel gauges are making "contentful discriminations"
when they distinguish an empty from a full tank of gasoline. Ringing
29 Dennett and Kinsbourne, "Time and the Observer," 183-247.
30 Ibid., 238.
31 Ibid., 184, 185.
32 We are told (ibid., 190) that even the ganglion cells in the rabbit's retina have the content
"from left to right." Also see Consciousness Explained, 134135, where the cortex is
described as making discriminations, decisions, and judgments.
33 The resemblance between Dennett and Pitcher is really quite remarkable at times. To
account for the richness of sense experience, Pitcher postulated many unconscious beliefs.
Dennett is more economical. He needs to posit only one microjudgment because he is
much more liberal with the content he is prepared to give that judgment: "There is no
upper bound on the 'amount of content' in a single proposition, so a single, swift, rich
'propositional episode' might (for all philosophical theory tells us) have so much content,
in its brainish, non-sentential way, that an army of Prousts might fail to express it
exhaustively in a library of volumes" ("Living on the Edge," 150).

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doorbells are "deciding" that someone is at the door. And a thermometer is "interpreting" the increased agitation of the molecules as a room
temperature of 78. We can talk this way, yes,34 but one must be careful
not to conclude from this way of talking that anything significant is
being said about the nature of perceptual experience. One has certainly
not shown that seeing an object, being perceptually aware of a thimble,
consists in a judgment that it is a thimble (or anything else) in anything
like the ordinary sense of the word "judgment." One is certainly not
entitled to conclude that "there is no such phenomenon as really seeming over and above the phenomenon of judging that something is the
case." Once the bloated terminology is eliminated, all one can really
conclude is that perception is a complex causal process in which there
are, in the nervous system, different responses to different stimuli. Causal
theorists have been saying that sort of thing for years. No one took them
to be propounding a theory of consciousness. Perhaps they could have
improved their case by calling the products of such causal processes
"narrative fragments" or "microtakings." It sounds so much more . . .
uh . . . mental.

4. CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE

Despite his reputation as an instrumentalist, Dennett is a rugged (not just

a "sort of') 3 5 realist about conscious experience: "Conscious experiences
are real events occurring in the real time and space of the brain, and
hence they are dockable and locatable within the appropriate limits of
precision for real phenomena of their type."36 He is, however, also a
cognitivist: "There is no such phenomenon as really seeming - over and
above the phenomenon of judging in one way or another that some34 I like to talk this way myself, but to avoid confusion I prefer to use the word "information" for these (largely) causal relationships see my Knowledge and the Flow of Information
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981). Information can be described in propositional
terms, and in this sense it (like judgment and belief) has propositional content. But lest
we start ascribing judgments, decisions, and takings to doorbells, fuel gauges, and thermometers, I think it useful to distinguish information from such conceptual phenomena
as belief and judgment. Dennett did too in Content and Consciousness; see his distinction
between intelligent and nonintelligent storage of information (pp. 45ff.).
35 The reference to "sort of" realism comes from Dennett's own description of his position
in "Postscript: Reflections: Instrumentalism Reconsidered," in D. Rosenthal, ed., The
Nature of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 627.
36 Dennett and Kinsbourne, "Time and the Observer," 235.

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thing is the case."37 Perceptual awareness is real enough, yes, but it

consists of judgments all the way down or out (to the retina).
I have no quarrel with Dennett's realism. I am taking issue only with
his cognitivism, the idea that seeing or hearing X being perceptually
aware or conscious of X is a species of judgment. I reject the idea that
conception of objects is necessary to, let alone identical with, their
perception.
It is important to understand that the disagreement is not about the
existence of qualia at least not if qualia are conceived in the way
Dennett conceives of them when he quines qualia.38 I'll return to the
issue of qualia in the next section. Here I only mean to point out that
the dispute about qualia what they are and whether they exist - merely
muddies these waters. What Dennett is rejecting in his well-known essay
against qualia is the existence of mental particulars that are (1) ineffable,
(2) intrinsic, (3) private, and (4) directly or immediately apprehensible.
I, too, have serious doubts about whether anything can have all these
properties. Thus, I am happy, for the sake of argument, and because I
agree with so much of what he says about qualia, to grant that our
experience of the world has none of these qualities. That, though, is not
the point. The point is not whether perceptual experience is ineffable.
It isn't. It is not whether the properties external objects seem to have
are intrinsic properties of our experience. I agree that they are not.
Neither is the quarrel about our direct apprehension of experience. The
issue, rather, is whether our experience is constituted by thoughtlike
entities, entities that, like beliefs and judgments, require some conceptual
understanding on the part of the agent of that which the judgment is
about.
If perceptual experience of a <|) is not a judgment, a belief, a taking
(macro, mini, or micro) of (|) to be a (|) (or whatever), what is it? I have
elsewhere answered this question in terms of the way sensory information is coded.39 There is more information in our experience of the
world than can normally be processed in a way appropriate to belief and
judgment. The transition from an experience of X t o a belief about Xis
a conversion of sensory information from analog to digital form. I have
37 Consciousness Explained, 364.
38 Dennett, "Quining Qualia," in A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988).
39 See my "The Role of the Percept in Visual Cognition," in W. Savage, ed., Minnesota
Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Perception and Cognition, vol. 9 (Minneapolis, Minn.:
University of Minnesota Press, 1978) and Knowledge and the Flow of Information.

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sometimes illustrated this process with examples involving our perception of complex scenes: crowds of people, shelves full of books, a sky
full of stars, arrays of numbers, and so on. Since Dennett has used similar
examples to reach an opposite conclusion, let me sharpen our points of
disagreement by considering such an example.
Consider a two-year-old child I will call her Sarah who knows
what fingers are but has not yet learned to count, does not yet know
what it means to say there are five fingers on her hand, five cookies in
the jar, and so on. Sarah can, I claim, see all five fingers on her hand
not one at a time, but all five at once.40 This is, I know, an empirical
claim, but it is an empirical claim for which there is, for normal twoyear-olds, an enormous amount of evidence. Whether or not Sarah sees
all five fingers depends, of course, on Sarah, the lighting, the angle at
which she sees the fingers, and so on. Let us suppose, though, that Sarah
is a child of average eyesight (intelligence has nothing to do with it),
that she is looking at the fingers in good light, and that each finger is in
plain view. Part of what it means to say that Sarah sees all five fingers is
that if you conceal one of the fingers, things will look different to Sarah.
There will then be only four fingers she sees. There will not only be
one less (visible) finger in the world, but one less finger in Sarah's
experience of the world. This difference in the world makes a difference
in Sarah's experience of the world, and it makes a difference even when
Sarah is unable to judge what difference it makes or even that it makes a
difference. I would like to say that the same is true of birds and cats,
but, out of deference to Dennett's unstable intuitions, I promised not to
mention animals again.
I have heard cognitivists insist that one can see five objects, even
without judging there to be five, by executing five judgments, one for
each object seen. Although Sarah cannot count to five - thus cannot
take there to be five objects she can, simultaneously as it were, take
there to be a finger five different times. Cognitivists are a stubborn
bunch, but this strikes me as a fairly desperate move, not one that
Dennett would happily make. Cognitivists want to define what is seen
in terms of what one judges, the content of a judgment, not in terms of

40 There is a sense in which one can see n objects without seeing any of the n objects. One
might, for example, see a flock of eighty-four birds or a herd of thirty-six cows without
seeing any individual bird or cow. The flock or herd, seen from a great distance, might
look like a spot in the distance. This is not the sense in which I say Sarah sees five fingers.
Sarah sees each of the five fingers, not (just) a heap (flock, herd, pile) of five fingers.

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properties of the judgment itself. An object is supposed to look blue,

according to orthodox cognitivism, if and only if one takes it to be (or
look?) blue, not if the taking is itself blue. Likewise, one would suppose,
seeing five fingers is a matter of taking there to be five fingers, not of
there being five finger-takings.
I know this is tedious. Nonetheless, these facts, although painfully
obvious, appear to need repetition. For it follows from these facts that
there is a sense in which objects can look (|) to a person without that
person judging or believing that anything is or looks <|). If Sarah had the
concept FIVE and knew the difference between FIVE and FOUR, she
would have a way of describing what she sees and a way of describing
the way things look. But the fact that she is not able to describe the way
things look does not mean that things do not look that way to her.
Although she cannot describe the way five fingers look to her, we can:
Dennett denies that the multiplicity, the richness, the fiveness, is in
Sarah's experience of the world. A child who does not judge there to
be five fingers is not conscious of five fingers:
When we marvel, in those moments of heightened self-consciousness, at the
glorious richness of our conscious experience, the richness we marvel at is
actually the richness of the world outside, in all its ravishing detail. It does not
"enter" our conscious minds, but is simply available.41
This is false. It is false not on philosophical grounds, but (for anyone
willing to admit that one object can "enter" a conscious mind) false on
straightforward empirical grounds. The ravishing detail of the world does
not cease to exist when we close our eyes. Our experience of this
ravishing detail does cease to exist when we close our eyes. So the
ravishing detail is not only "in" the world.42
I take such situations to be critically important, and I harp about them
at wearisome length in order to bring out the basic difference between
perceptual experience and perceptual belief. A person's experience of
the world can exhibit43 the property 0 even if the person in whom that
experience occurs does not have the concept <|>, does not understand
what it means to be <|>, is unable (therefore) to make judgments or have
41 Conscious Explained, 408.
42 M. J. Farah (Visual Agnosia, 18) points out that counting requires seeing more than one
object at a time and, I would add (since otherwise why would you be counting?), seeing
more than you know or judge yourself to be seeing.
43 I choose this word carefully. I explain why later.

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beliefs to the effect that something is (|). In terms of descriptive detail,

Sarah's experience of five fingers exceeds her powers of judgment. She
experiences more than she can know, more than she can believe or
judge. This, indeed, is what the adjective "phenomenal" is meant to
signify. Phenomenal properties are, in exactly this sense, independent of
belief. Your experience can exhibit <|) even though you may not be able
to judge that something is (|). It is in this sense that fiveness is a phenomenal property of Sarah's experience of her own hand.44
Although the point is especially obvious with regard to numbers, the
same holds true for color, shape, orientation, movement, and many
other properties. Although they would not describe it that way, something can look blue and hexagonal to persons who have neither the
concept blue nor the concept hexagonal to anyone, therefore, who is
unable to judge or describe it as looking this way.
Dennett is rightfully skeptical of the more extravagant feats of "filling
in" alleged for perceptual experience. Does one really see hundreds of
Marilyn Monroe pictures spread across the wall? There may be a hundred "out there" on the wall, but how many are "in here," in one's
experience of the wall? I don't know. Given what we know about
diminished acuity outside the fovea, probably not as many as it seems,
certainly not as many as are actually out there. But, often enough, there
are a lot more "in here" than I bother to discover by counting. Personally, I think it fairly easy to see, in a brief glance, dozens, sometimes
hundreds, of objects. I do it all the time.45 But we needn't quarrel about
big numbers. The argument for phenomenal experience is made as well
with five objects as it is with a hundred. If one can see five objects
without judging or taking there to be five, and seeing five involves a
different experience from seeing four, then experience of the world
exhibits properties that are not exhibited in judgment.

44

45

This way of putting the case for phenomenal properties is, I think, quite close to Ned
Block's insightful suggestions about the need to distinguish what he calls phenomenal
consciousness from access consciousness. See Block's "Inverted Earth," in J. Tomberlin,
ed., Philosophical Perspectives, 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (Atascadero, Calif:
Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1990); "Consciousness and Accessibility," The Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 13 (1990): 596598; "Evidence against Epiphenomenalism," The Behavioral
and Brain Sciences, 14 (1991): 670672; and his review of Dennett's Consciousness Explained
in The Journal ojPhilosophy 90 (1993): 181-192.
I argue this point in greater detail in "Conscious Experience," Mind 102 (1993): 2 6 3 283.

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5. QUALIA

In "Quining Qualia" Dennett tells us that qualia are the way things look
or appear.46 As long as one understands the look to be what I just called
the phenomenal appearances (= the way things look that is logically
although surely not causally independent of what a person believes or
judges), this is a workable definition. It captures what most philosophers
mean to be arguing about when they argue about qualia. I'm willing to
work with it.
According to this definition, then, a person who sees a blue hexagon
in normal circumstances will have an experience that exhibits the qualia
blueness and hexagonality. These are among the person's visual qualia
whether or not that person is able to judge or say that there is, or appears
to be, a blue hexagon in front of her. Although I promised not to
mention animals again, I cannot forbear saying that it will also be the
qualia of normally sighted chimpanzees and a great variety of other
mammals. If there are genuine doubts about this, the evidence lies in
discrimination and matching tests plus a little neurophysiology.47
I said earlier that I agreed with much that Dennett has said about
qualia. If qualia are supposed to be ineffable, intrinsic, privileged, and so
on, then, I agree, there are no qualia. But there is no reason to throw a
clean baby out with dirty bathwater. We can, as Flanagan argues, keep
the qualia and renounce the philosophical accretions.48 I do not believe
in sense data, but I don't renounce sense perception because philosophers have said confused things about it.
Consider ineffability. If S's qualia are identified with the way things
look to S, then, since something can look (|) to a person unable to judge
that it is (|), a person's qualia may be quite ineffable by that person at the
time she has them. Sarah, at two years old, cannot express the fiveness
that she experiences. But we can. I did. Those of us who know what
properties objects have and, thus, the ways that objects will appear in
normal conditions - can describe our own and other people's qualia. I
did this for Sarah and I can do it for chimps. If chimps and children can
see blue hexagons, and if they are not color-blind, then, whether or not
they know it, their visual qualia are hexagonality and blueness. In normal

46 "Quining Qualia," 42.

47 See, for example, S. Walker, Animal Thought (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983),
ch. 7; D. R. Griffin, Animal Minds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
48 O. Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

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viewing conditions, that is the way blue hexagons look to normally

sighted children and chimps. There is nothing ineffable about their
qualia.
In fact, according to Dennett's own characterization, it is difficult to
see how qualia could fail to be effable. If a phenomenal property, a
quale, is simply one of the ways things can appear to be, and we assume
that things sometimes are the way they appear to be, then a catalog of
qualia is, presumably, a list of the way things are: blue, hexagonal, bigger
than a bread box, moving, loud, far away, bright, salty, circular, angry,
upset, and so on. Qualia, in fact, are just our old, familiar properties. If
qualia are the properties of phenomenal consciousness, there is nothing
"sublimely inaccessible" about them. 49 The problem is not with qualia
but with the way experiences "exhibit" qualia. More of this in a moment.
Also, if we remember that in the definition of qualia the sense of
"looks" or "appears" is the phenomenal sense, the sense in which
something can look (|) to a person unable to make (^-judgments, then
qualia, quite clearly, do not enjoy privileged epistemological status. Most
of a two-year-old's qualia are completely inaccessible to the two-yearold. This is not to say that the two-year-old doesn't have qualia. It is
only to say that she does not know, perhaps cannot know, what qualia it
is she has. Introspection isn't going to help Sarah figure out that there
appear to be five fingers on her hand. Others, those who have the
relevant concepts and are in a position to make informed judgments
about how things look to Sarah, have better access (epistemologically
speaking) to some of Sarah's qualia than she does. That is why we, or at
least informed ethologists, know more about a chimp's qualia than the
chimp does. Sarah and the chimp "enjoy" the qualia, yes. They are,
after all, their qualia. But we know better than they what it is they are
enjoying. In that sense there is no privileged access.
Up to this point I have been careful to say that experiences "exhibited" phenomenal properties (qualia). Sarah's experience of five fingers
exhibits fiveness. Her experience of blue hexagons exhibits blueness and
hexagonality. I avoided saying that one's experiences had the properties
they exhibited. I avoided saying it because frankly, it sounds silly. This

49 Dennett and Kinsbourne, "Time and the Observer," 240. I may appear to be skating
rather cavalierly over the inverted-spectrum problem here. I admit the appearances but
deny the reality. I do not, however, have the time to justify this claim. So the appearances
will have to stand.

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is an instance of the old Sense-Datum Fallacy the fallacy of inferring

that if an object, X, looks (|), then something (the look of X?, an X-ish
sense-datum?) must be (|).50 An experience of five fingers is different
from an experience of four, and different in a way that depends on the
number of fingers being viewed, but the experience of five need not
itself be five nor need it differ numerically from the experience of four.
An experience of blue exhibits the property blue, but need not itself be
blue nor need it be a different color (if it is colored at all) than the
experience of red. Qualia, if these are the way things seem, are not to
be understood as properties of the seeming. If this is what it means to
deny that qualia are intrinsic properties of experiences, then, once again,
I agree with Dennett that qualia are not intrinsic properties of experience.
But if qualia are not intrinsic properties of experience, if my experience of blue need not itself be blue, what is the relation between an
experience and the qualia it exhibits? How can an experience exhibit
the qualia blueness (during hallucination, for instance) if there is nothing
either inside or outside the head that is blue?
It is the search for an answer to this question, a question about the
relationship between an experience of blue and the blue that is experienced, that drove many philosophers into sense-data wonderland. If
something looks blue and there is no available object either inside or
outside the head that is blue, then some object has to be invented, a
sense datum, to bear or have the property blue. Dennett rightly rejects
this nonsense. Along with other card-carrying cognitivists, he avoids the
fallacy by replacing sense data with their modern equivalent: minijudgments or microtakings. When an object looks blue, there need be
nothing in the head that is blue. Why? Because looking blue is, you see,
a form of judgment, a microjudgment, that something is blue, and just
as a judgment that something is edible need not itself be edible, a
judgment that something is blue need not itself be blue. Blue sense data
are thereby banished. Replacing them are, let us say, soggy gray judgments (microtakings, potential beliefs, suppressed cognitions) that something is blue something one might actually hope to find in the brain
if one knows what to look for.

50 Dennett and Kinsbourne ("Time and the Observer") do an excellent job of exposing this
fallacious pattern of inference when it occurs in our thinking about representations especially those having to do with temporal properties. The properties represented are
not, or need not be, properties of the representation.

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The trouble with this answer, as I have been at pains to argue, is that
the microjudgments, the potential beliefs, the suppressed inclinations,
have to occur in persons and animals incapable of making the corresponding judgments or having the relevant beliefs. Why, then, call them
judgments or beliefs? If Sarah's visual system can "take" there to be five
fingers on her hand without Sarah's taking there to be five fingers on
her hand, what sorts of inventions are these microtakings, these narrative
fragments, these partial drafts? Until we know, we won't know what
conscious experience is.

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The Mind's Awareness of Itself

The hard problem of consciousness, the place where the explanatory gap
is widest viz., the nature of phenomenal experience is especially
vexing for people who believe that:
(1) Conscious perceptual experiences exist inside a person (probably somewhere
in the brain)1
(2) Nothing existing inside a person has (or needs to have2) the properties one
is aware of in having these experiences.
Reprinted from Philosophical Studies (1999), 1-22, copyright 1999 by Kluwer Academic
Publishers, with kind permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers. My thanks to Bill
Lycan, Tom Nagel, and Ned Block for helpful criticisms.
1 Locating the mind (thoughts, experiences, etc.) inside the head is not a denial of externalism
about the mind. Externalism is the view that what makes a mental state the mental state it
is are factors existing outside the person. Externalism is consistent with (indeed, I think it
implies) the claim that mental states are inside the person. What is external (according to
externalism) are not the thoughts and experiences themselves, but (some of) the factors that
make them thoughts and experiences. Money is no less in my pocket by having the factors
that make it money existing outside my pocket.
2 The parenthetical qualification is necessary because, of course, there are exceptions. Sometimes there is something existing in the head of a person having an experience that has the
properties that person is aware of in having that experience. Think, for example, of seeing
your own teeth (in a mirror) or a human brain. In seeing someone else's brain, something
in your head (viz., your brain) has the properties (gray, brain-shaped, etc.) that you are
aware of. This, of course, is the exception. Typically, we do not see things that look like
things in our heads. I will here be concerned with visual experiences (e.g., that of seeing
or - in hallucination - seeming to see, a pumpkin) the phenomenal qualities of which
(color, shape, movement, texture, distance) are not properties of anything in the brain of
the experiencer. For this reason I will generally omit the qualification "or needs to have"
and simply assume that nothing in the head has the properties that one is aware of in
having the experience.
I later (3) return to other exceptions to (2), proprioception e.g., headaches, itches,
cramps, and thirst, bodily sensations that (according to some) are internal and have the

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The experience I have when I see (dream of, hallucinate) a large orange
pumpkin has to be inside me. Why else would it cease to exist when I
close my eyes, awaken, or sober up? Yet, nothing inside me - certainly
nothing in my brain has the properties I am aware of when I have this
experience. There is nothing orange and pumpkin-shaped in my head.
How, then, can I be aware of what my perceptual experiences are like
presumably a matter of knowing what qualities they have - if none of
the properties I am aware of when I have these experiences are properties of the experience?
Surely, though, we are, in some sense, aware of our own conscious
experiences. We have, if not infallible, then privileged, access to their
phenomenal character. I may not know what it is like to be a bat, but I
certainly know what it is like to be me, and what it is like to be me is
primarily some would say it is exclusively a matter of the phenomenal qualities of my perceptual (including proprioceptive) experience. I
am aware - directly aware - of what it is like to see (dream of, hallucinate) orange pumpkins. If such awareness is incompatible with (1) and
(2), so much the worse for (1) and (2).
This is a problem that some philosophers have given up trying to
solve. Others spend time tinkering with (2). The problem is real enough,
but (2) is not the culprit. The solution lies in distinguishing between the
fundamentally different sorts of things we are aware of and, as a result,
the different forms that awareness (or consciousness3) of things can take.
Once these distinctions are in place, we can see why (1) and (2) are
compatible with privileged awareness of one's own experience. We can
have our cake and eat it too.
By way of previewing the argument for this conclusion, let o be an
object (or event, condition, state i.e., a spatiotemporal particular), P a
property of o. We speak of being aware of o, of P, and of the fact that o
is P. These differences in the ontological kinds of which we are aware
are reflected in corresponding differences in the acts of awareness.
Awareness of P is a much different mental state from awareness of the o
that is P, and both differ from an awareness of the fact that o is P.
In thinking about the mind's awareness of itself, these differences are

properties of which one is aware in having these sensations. For the present I mean to
focus exclusively on perceptual modalities - hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and feeling that are of (or purport to be of) external objects and conditions.
I use these terms interchangeably when they are followed by a word or phrase specifying
what we are aware (conscious) of.

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important. For if e is some mental particular and ^3 a property of e4 we

must not confuse awareness that t is $J3 with awareness of either t or %.
For one can be aware of the former - aware, that is, that one's experience is ^3 - without being aware of either the experience (e) itself or
the quality ($) that helps make it that kind of experience.
Therein lies an answer to the puzzle generated by (1) and (2), the
puzzle of how one can be aware of internal affairs aware of what one's
experiences are like - without being aware of these experiences themselves or of the properties that give them their phenomenal character.
The mind's awareness of itself is an awareness of facts about itself, an
awareness that internal experience, e, is ^3. It is not an awareness of the
internal object t or the property ^3 out of which such facts are composed. The facts we are aware of in knowing what it is like to experience
orange pumpkins are, to be sure, facts about internal affairs thus the
truth of (1) - but the properties we are aware of in achieving this
awareness (being universals5) exist nowhere. They aren't in the head.
Thus the truth of (2).
1. OBJECTS, PROPERTIES, AND FACTS
When an object is moving, I can be aware of (A) the moving object;
(B) the fact that it is moving; (C) the movement; (D) all of these; (E)
none of these. Consider:
Case A: I study the minute hand of a clock. The hand is moving, so
the object I see, the object I am aware of, is a moving object. I do not,
however, sense, I am not aware of, its movement. Nor (thinking the
clock is broken) am I aware of the fact that it is moving. I am aware (I
see) the moving hand, o, but I am aware of neither its movement, M,
nor the fact that it is moving: that o is M.
Case B: I observe the minute hand on the clock for several minutes.
I see that the hand is in a different position now than it was a moment

Throughout this essay I will use o to designate an external physical object (e.g., a pumpkin)
e a mental particular (e.g., a visual experience of o); P, M, and C properties of o; and 9$,
Wl, and ( (Old English font) properties of e.
I assume that universals (and, a fortiori, the universals one is aware of) are neither inside
nor outside the head. Awareness of colors, shapes, and movements, when there is no
external object that has the property one is aware of, is not, therefore, a violation of (2). A
measuring instrument (a speedometer, for example) can (when malfunctioning) be "aware
of" (i.e., represent) a speed of 45 mph without any object's (inside or outside the instrument) having this magnitude.

160

ago. I thus become aware that it is moving. Nonetheless, I still do not

perceive the movement. The minute hand moves too slowly for that. I
know it is moving, but I cannot see it move. I am aware of o and that o
is M but not M.
Case C: I observe the movement of a nearby vehicle and mistakenly
take it to be my own movement. I stomp on the brakes. Nothing
happens. In this case I was aware of both the neighboring vehicle and
its movement without at the time being aware that it (the adjacent
vehicle) was moving. I thought I was moving. Awareness of o and M,
but not of the fact that o is M.
Case D: I observe the second hand of another clock. Unlike the
minute hand of the first clock, the movement of this object is plainly
visible. I am aware of the moving hand, its movement, and also the fact
that it is moving. When one becomes aware of the fact that o is M by
awareness of both o and the M of o, I call it direct fact-awareness. I am
directly aware that the second hand is moving but indirectly aware that
the minute hand is moving.
Case E: I am aware of neither the object, nor its properties, nor the
fact that it has those properties. There are unobservable objects (e.g.,
electrons) that have properties (e.g., spin) I am not conscious of. I am,
to be sure, aware of the fact that electrons have this property (I read
about it in a book), but there was a time when I was not aware. There
was a time, in other words, when I was unaware of 0, the property S,
and the fact that 0 was S (not to mention the fact that there were os).
I will call these three forms of awareness o-awareness (for objectawareness6), ^awareness (for ^zc-awareness), and >-awareness (for property-awareness). When the kind of awareness is clear from the context when, for example, I am talking about an awareness (and, thus, a pawareness) of properties - I will generally drop the distracting prefixes.
There are times, though, when it is important to specify exactly which
I count token events (e.g., particular battles, deaths), states of affairs (my lamp being on,
your key being lost), conditions (the mess in his room), situations (= conditions), and
processes (my tooth decaying, the maple tree shedding its leaves) as objects. They are, to
be sure, peculiar objects about which a great deal more could (and probably should) be
said (especially about our awareness of them), but I do not have the time to discuss these
complications. For my purposes it is enough to note that token events, states, and conditions are spatiotemporal particulars that are (like apples and stars) distinct from both the
facts and properties from which I distinguish objects. Events and conditions have a (temporal) beginning and an end. Properties do not. Neither do facts. As Dostoyevsky put it, a
person's suffering (an event or condition) ends, but the fact that the person suffers endures
forever.

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form of awareness is at issue, and on these occasions the prefixes will

appear. Although I use movement (a relational property) to illustrate
these distinctions, I could just as well have used any other property. I
can, for instance, be^aware that the wine is sweet (someone told me it
was or I read the label) without being aware of the wine or its sweetness
(I do not taste the wine for myself). One sees a fabric in normal light
thus experiencing (becoming ^-aware of) its color (blue, say) - without
realizing, without beings-aware, that it is blue. One thinks, mistakenly,
that the illumination is abnormal and the fabric only looks blue. And one
can be aware of the color of Tim's tie that particular shade of blue without being o-aware of his tie or the fact that it is blue. One sees
another object of exactly the same color. If it sounds odd to speak of
being aware of an object's color without actually seeing the object,
imagine someone pointing at another object (a color sample perhaps)
and saying, "That is the color of his tie." 7 What you are made /?-aware
of when you see the color sample is the color of his tie. One might also
be ^-aware of the color of his tie while being aware of no object at all.
Imagine hallucinating about a homogeneous expanse of color that exactly matches the blue of his tie.
This last claim may sound false - at least controversial. When a person
hallucinates about pink rats, isn't the person aware of colored, rat-shaped
images? Isn't awareness of properties (colors, shapes, sizes, orientations,
etc.) always (and necessarily) awareness of objects having these properties? To insist on this point is a way of denying (2). It is a way of saying
that, at least in hallucination, there is something (an image, a sense

Depending on the property in question, it will sometimes sound odd to say that one is
aware of o's P-ness without being aware of o. For example, can one become aware of the
second hand's movement without being aware of (seeing, feeling, or somehow sensing) the
second hand itself? Can one be aware of my movement (executing a dance step, say) by
observing another person execute the same movement?
We are sometimes, of course, interested not in universal properties but in particular
instancings of these universal properties - what philosophers call tropes. Although two
objects, a and b, are the same color or execute the same movement (i.e., instantiate the
same universal property P), as color (trope) is not the same as b's color (trope), nor is the
movement (trope) of a the same as the movement (trope) of b. As a fact about ordinary
usage, I think we generally mean to refer to something like a trope when we speak of as
movement or the movement of a - a universal property, movement, as realized in a particular
individual. We perhaps come closer to the universal property in speaking of the movement
that an individual executes.
My claim that property-awareness is independent of object-awareness, then, is a claim
about our awareness of universal properties, the properties objects can share with other
objects, and not an object's particular "value" (trope) of this shareable property.

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datum) in one's head that has the properties one is aware of in having
the experience. Since I am here exploring the possibility of understanding conscious experience given the truth of both (1) and (2), I assume,
to the contrary, that hallucinations are experiences in which one is aware
of properties (shapes, colors, movements, etc.) without being oconscious of objects having these properties. To suppose that awareness
of property P must always be an awareness of an object having property
P is what Roderick Chisholm (1957) called the Sense-Datum Fallacy.
Following Chisholm, and in accordance with (2), I will take this to be a
genuine fallacy. Hallucinating about pumpkins is not to be understood
as an awareness of orange pumpkin-shaped objects. It is rather to be
understood as >-awareness of the kind of properties that o-awareness of
pumpkins is usually accompanied by.
Awareness (i.e., ^-awareness) of properties without awareness (pawareness) of objects having these properties may still strike some readers
as bizarre. Can we really be aware of (uninstantiated) universals? Yes,
we can, and, yes, we sometimes are. It is well documented that the brain
processes visual information in segregated cortical areas (see Hardcastle
1994 for references and discussion). One region computes the orientation of lines and edges, another responds to color, still another to
movement.8 As a result of this specialization it is possible, by suitable
manipulation, to experience one property without experiencing others
with which it normally co-occurs. In the aftereffect called the waterfall
phenomenon, for instance, one becomes aware of movement without the
movement's being of any thing. There is apparent motion without the
appearance of anything moving. To obtain this effect one stares for
several minutes at something (e.g., a waterfall) that moves steadily in
one direction. In transferring one's gaze to a stationary scene one then
experiences movement in the opposite direction. Remarkably, though,
this movement does not "attach" itself to objects. None of the objects
one sees appear to be moving. Yet, one experiences movement. As a
psychologist (Frisby 1980, p. 101) puts it, "although the after-effect gives
a very clear illusion of movement, the apparently moving features nevertheless seem to stay still!" One becomes, he says, "aware of features

This gives rise to what psychologists call the binding problem: how does the nervous system
"pull together," so to speak, all the information about different properties into a unified
experience of a single object an object that has all those properties? How does the brain
put this shape together with this color and that movement to get (the appearance of) an
orange pumpkin moving to the left?

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remaining in their 'proper' locations even though they are seen as

moving." Frisby describes this as "contradictory," but it is nothing more
than p-awareness of one property (movement) without this movement's
being instantiated (as it normally is) in or by some object. One's movement detectors are active, but they are not made active by any object
possessing the normal constellation of visual properties (shape, color,
texture, etc.).
Everyday perception is generally a mixture of object-, property-, and
fact-awareness. Usually we become aware of facts by becoming aware
of the objects and properties that constitute these facts. I become aware
that his tie is blue by seeing his tie and its color. I become aware that
gas is escaping by smelling the escaping gas. Perceptual modalities being
what they are, though, we are often made aware of facts by being made
aware of properties altogether different from those involved in these
facts. We become/-aware that the metal is hot by seeing it change color,
not by seeing or feeling its temperature. Instruments, gauges, and natural
signs (tree rings, tracks in the snow, cloud formations, etc.) have familiarized us with the various ways awareness of facts is mediated by
awareness of objects and properties quite different from those involved
in the facts. I see that the water is 92F by an awareness not of the water,
but of a thermometer and the height of its mercury column. Use of
language in communication is another source of/-awareness in which
there is little or no connection between the objects (sounds and marks)
and properties (spatial and temporal arrangement of symbols) we perceive and the facts (reported on) that communication makes one/aware
of. When /awareness is mediated by awareness of properties and/or
objects other than those involved in the fact, the/awareness is indirect.
Thus, awareness that your daughter has a fever is indirect when you use
a thermometer, direct when you feel her forehead.
The phenomenology of perceptual experience is determined by the
totality of qualities one is p-aware of. Object and fact awareness contribute nothing. Phenomenally speaking, one can be aware of different
objects (e.g., twins) while having exactly the same (type of) experience.
Likewise, different people (or the same person at different times) can be
having the same experience while being aware of quite different facts:
one person is aware that the flower he sees is a geranium; the other is
aware of the same flower - it looks the same to him - but he is not
aware that it is a geranium. Same object and property awareness, different fact-awareness. Object-awareness has to do not with the qualities of
one's experience, but with the causal relations of the experience to

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objects in the world. Fact-awareness has to do not with the qualities of

one's experience, but with the kind of knowledge these experiences give
rise to.
There is, then, a virtual9 independence (conceptual, not causal; the
facts one is aware of may affect, causally, the properties one is aware of,
the way an object looks) between ^awareness, o-awareness, and pawareness when the awareness is perceptual. We can, and we often do,
have one without the others. If this is also true - and why shouldn't it
be? - of awareness of mental affairs, this tells us something important
about awareness of our own conscious states. I begin by describing what
it tells us about a special class of conscious experiences - perceptual
experiences.
2. PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE
Perceptual experiences are phenomenally rich in a way that beliefs are
not. Unlike a belief or judgment (an ^awareness) that a pumpkin is
moving toward you (something you can have without awareness of
either the pumpkin or its movement), seeing a pumpkin move involves
an experience that is phenomenally quite different from experiencing a
green bean move toward you, a red tomato moving to the left, a ripe
banana rotating in place, and so on. The experience of a moving pumpkin, although it is caused by a pumpkin (and, according to causal theorists, must be so caused in order to be rightly classified as an experience
of a pumpkin), is detachable from external causes in the sense that the
very same kind of experience an experience having the same phenomenal character - could occur (and in pumpkin hallucinations does occur)
without a pumpkin.
This much, I hope, is philosophical (not to mention psychological)
common sense. Disagreement arises when we turn to questions about
9

"Virtual" because there are relations other than these forms of awareness that I must (given
my limited purposes here) ignore. For instance, it might be argued (plausibly, I think) that
o-awareness requires p-awareness of some properties - if not the properties the object
actually has, then the properties it appears to have. You can't perceive (thus be aware of)
an object unless it appears some way to you, and if appearing (|) to S is a way of S being paware of the property (|), then o-awareness requires /^-awareness of (|) for some property (f).
This, I think, is one possible (and for my money, the only plausible) way of construing the
doctrine that all seeing is seeing as.
I am willing to concede some degree of dependence. It will not be important for the
use to which I will put these distinctions. I will exploit only the degree of independence my
examples have already established.

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our awareness not of pumpkins, their properties,10 and facts about them,
but of our experience (C) of a pumpkin, its properties, and facts about it.
Letting ^3 stand for a property of a pumpkin experience, a property that
helps makes this experience the kind of experience it is, how does one
become aware that t is ^S? Is this achieved by an awareness of e and %
or is it, instead, indirect mediated by an awareness of some other
object and (or) property?
John Locke (1959) thought that the mind's awareness of itself was
quasi-perceptual and, thus, direct. We become aware that a visual experience is ?$ in the same way we can (if we trust common sense)
become aware that a pumpkin is P - by means of o-awareness of the
experience and p-awareness of ^3 According to some philosophers, all
fact-awareness begins here.11 Thus, awareness of facts about a pumpkin,
that it is P, are reached via inference from o-awareness of and pawareness of one or more of its properties. We become fact-aware of
what is going on outside the mind in something like the way we become
^ aware of what is happening outside a room in which we watch TV.
The only objects we are aware of are in the room (e.g., the television
set); the only properties we are aware of are properties of those objects
(patterns on the screen). Only ^awareness awareness of what is happening on the playing field, concert hall, or broadcast studio - is capable
of taking us outside the room.
I will not discuss such theories (basically sense-data theories). I set
them aside, without argument, because they all deny thesis (2), and my

10 I will typically use movement and shape as my examples of properties that we can (and
do) become aware of in visual perception. I could as well use (I sometimes do use) color,
but for obvious reasons (relating to the thesis I am proposing) I prefer to avoid the
"secondary" properties and concentrate on the "primary" ones since some people will
surely insist that it is not the pumpkin that is (phenomenally) orange, but our experience
(or some proper part of our experience) of the pumpkin. The only relevant property that
the pumpkin has is a disposition to produce orange es (pumpkin experiences) in properly
situated perceivers.
I do not share this view of color (and the other so-called secondary properties). I do
not see how any materialist can (see (1) and (2) and the following discussion). I take color,
the surface property of things that we experience in experiencing objects, to be an
objective property of the objects we experience. For this reason I sometimes use color,
smell, sounds, etc. in my examples. For those who find this realism objectionable (or
question-begging), please substitute an appropriate primary property e.g., movement
shape, orientation, extension - whenever I use an objectionable secondary property. I
don't think anything important hangs on my choice of examples.
11 For skeptics it often ends here. If/-awareness is a form of knowledge, the only ^-awareness
is of mental affairs i.e., facts of the form: that C is 9$.

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purpose here is to understand the mind's awareness of itself in a way

compatible with (1) and (2). Contrary to (2), sense-data theories affirm
that there is something in a person's head that has the properties the
person is aware of when he sees or hallucinates about an orange pumpkin. Sense data are inside, and sense data actually have the properties
one is aware of when one sees or hallucinates about a pumpkin. The
sense datum is orange. It is bulgy and shaped like a pumpkin. It moves
at least it does so relative to other sense data. In having a visual experience of a pumpkin it is the bulgy orange sense datum, an internal object,
one is o-aware of, and it is the properties of this internal object one is paware of. Awareness of pumpkins is, at best, indirect. It is the same type
of awareness (i.e., ^-awareness) that one has of Boris Yeltsin when one
"sees" him on TV.
Armed as we now are with the distinction between object-, property-, and fact-awareness, though, we are in a position to understand
what goes wrong in traditional arguments for indirect realism. We are
in a position to understand and, thus, resist - arguments against (2).
The mistake in traditional arguments lies in failing to distinguish between ^/-awareness of experience, that it has phenomenal character ^S,
on the one hand, and, on the other, p-awareness of the qualities (e.g.,
^3) that give it this character. Failing to distinguish these forms of
awareness, one concludes, mistakenly, that awareness of what it is like
to see (experience) pumpkins must be awareness of the properties (i.e.,
9$) of these experiences. That is the first mistake the mistake of
inferring jp-awareness of the properties of experience from ^awareness
of the fact that experience has those properties. The second mistake (this
is optional; the major damage has already been done) is inferring oawareness from |>-awareness that is, inferring that one must be o-aware
of C in order to be p-aware of C's properties. The conclusion? To be
aware of what it is like to experience pumpkins, one must be aware of
one's own pumpkin experiences in something like the way one is aware
of pumpkins.
The fact that we don't have to be ^-aware of an object's properties
to be^-aware that it has those properties does not mean that we are not
aware of our own experiences and their properties. It only shows that
an awareness - even a privileged awareness - of what it is like to have
an experience is not, by itself, a good reason to think we are aware of
either the experience or its properties. Once the distinctions between
kinds of awareness are in place, privileged awareness of what it is like to
have an experience may simply be a form of fact-awareness, an indirect

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awareness of a fact about an experience that is both psychologically

immediate and epistemically privileged.
But how is this possible? How is it possible to be aware in both a
privileged and (or so it often seems) a direct way of facts about one's
experiences without being aware of either the experiences themselves or
their properties? If one's J-awareness of one's own experience is supposed to be indirect, like becoming aware, by looking at X-ray photographs, that one's arm is broken, what objects and properties is it an
awareness of that is supposed to give one this awareness? I can become
(indirectly) aware that my arm is broken by having the doctor tell me it
is or by looking at the photographs for myself, but what could possibly
bring about an indirect fact-awareness of the quality of one's own
experience that would preserve the immediacy and privileged character
of this awareness? No one tells us indeed, no one can tell us what
our own experiences are like the way a doctor can tell us about our
broken bones. X-rays are not of much help in telling what it is like to
be a bat or what it is like to see orange pumpkins. What, then, is
supposed to tell us what qualities our experiences have if we are not, in
having them, p-aware of them? There must be something (other than
the experience) that tells us this since, in accordance with (1) and (2),
we are now assuming that the properties we are aware of in having the
experience are not properties of the experience. If we are to be made/aware of what our experiences are like - that they are 9$ for some value
of "$$" then we must be made^aware of this fact by an awareness of
properties and objects other than those of the experience itself. What
are these other objects and properties?
They are what else? - the objects and properties these experiences
make us aware of. One is made aware of what a pumpkin experience is
like (that it is ^3) not by an awareness of the experience, but by an
awareness of the pumpkin and an awareness of its (the pumpkin's)
properties. When the perception is veridical, the qualities one becomes
>-aware of in having a perceptual experience are qualities of external
objects (the pumpkins) that one experiences, not qualities of the pumpkin experience. One becomes^aware of experience - that it is ^S - by
^-awareness of P the pumpkin's properties. The reasons-awareness of
P can make one ^aware that one's experience is ^3 is that $$ is the
property of being an experience, in fact a p-awareness, of P. P, the
property one is aware of in having the experience, tells one what specific
kind of experience e is: it is an e of the ^3 kind that is an awarenessof-P-kind. Even when there are no pumpkins, even when hallucinating,

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it is nonetheless true that what (properties) one is >-aware of in having

the pumpkin experience are color, shape, texture, distance, and movement properties that pumpkins normally have.
Consider the following analogy. One does not have to see (be aware
of) pictures of o (a photograph of a pumpkin, say) in order to be made
aware of what these pictures are like. It is sometimes enough to look at
what these pictures are pictures of (viz., the pumpkins) in order to tell
what the picture is like. The same is true of a visual experience of
pumpkins. Visual experiences of pumpkins are not pictures of pumpkins,
of course, but the analogy holds. To know what the experience is like,
what properties it has, it is enough for the experiencer to "look at" what
the experience is an experience of (something that, as the expenencer,
she cannot help but be doing). That will tell her what the (relevant)
properties of the experience are.12
The key to this account is the relation between P, the property we
are p-aware of in having experience e, and the property of the experience ($P) that we thereby become f-aware that e has. If P is the pumpkin's movement, a property one becomes aware of in observing a moving pumpkin, then ^3 is the property of being a p-awareness-of-P. 9$ is
the property a possibly stationary experience has that makes it an experience of movement.13 Although ^S is not a property one is /?-aware of,
12 The analogy may mislead in one respect. It may be thought, for instance, that looking at
what a photograph is a photograph of does not tell me what the photograph is like. I also
have to know something about the camera and film that produced the photo. Was the
camera in focus, for instance? Wide angle or telephoto? Was it color film or black and
white? Unless I know these things, looking at what the photo is a photo of tells me next
to nothing about what the photo is like.
All this is true, and it is an important disanalogy. It is, in fact, the reason why one
cannot tell what it is like to be a bat by looking at what the bat "looks" at (perceives) - a
moth, say. We don't know enough about the bat's "camera" and "film" to tell much
about what the bat's internal "pictures" of the moth are like. But this point, although
important, does not upset the usefulness of the analogy. For in the case of experience, the
person having the experience, the experiencer, looks at objects with the "camera" and
"film" whose characteristics are (or may be) unknown to third parties. The person sees
objects, as it were, through the lens and with the preloaded film hence, as these objects
are represented in his experience of them.
13 If one is a reductive materialist (like me), one will take $ to be some physical property of
the brain, a property the having of which makes an internal state into an experience, 2L pawareness, a representation, of movement. I try to give an account of this property (in
Dretske 1995). For present purposes, though, reductive accounts of 9$ are beside the
point. All that is needed to achieve compatibility with (1) and (2) is that 9$ = P - i.e.,
the property (i.e., ^3) of an experience that makes it an experience (a p-awareness) of P
(i.e. movement) is not (or need not) itself be P (the property we are aware of in having
the experience).

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it is a property that (helps) make an experience the kind of experience

it is an experience of a moving pumpkin.
What this means is that if we follow philosophical convention and
take qualia to be properties of one's experiences (and not the properties
one experiences), then it is ^3, not P, that is the quale. Nonetheless, it is
P (i.e., movement), not 9$ (an awareness of movement), that one is paware of. One is (or can be see 4) aware of the quale ^S, to be sure,
but this is fact-, not property-awareness. One's experiences of movement
do not (or need not) have the properties one is p-aware of in having
these experiences. The experiences of movement don't (needn't) move.
Nonetheless, when experiencing movement, the property the experience has is ^3, ap-awareness of movement.
This account of the mind's awareness of itself gives a neat and, I
think, satisfying account of both the psychological immediacy (i.e., the
seeming directness) of introspective knowledge and the epistemically
privileged character of self awareness. F-awareness of the fact that one's
experience (of P) is ^3 is psychologically immediate because, although it
is indirect (one is notp-aware of ^3), one cannot have an experience of
this sort without thereby being aware of a property viz., P of external
objects that reveals to the person having the experience exactly what
property viz., an awareness of P (= ^3) it is that his or her experience
has. Technically speaking (given my earlier definitions), this is indirect
fact-awareness, yes, but the fact one is indirectly aware of is so directly
given by the properties (of external objects) one is aware of that the
process (from p-awareness of P to J-awareness that one's experience is
^3), when it occurs, seems direct and immediate. It can be made to seem
even more direct, of course, if one confuses the properties one is aware
of in having the experience with the properties of the experience. Fawareness that e is ^3 is also privileged because only the person having
the experience is necessarily (in virtue of having it) aware of a property
(i.e., P) that reveals what kind of experience (viz., 9$) he is having.
Other people might also be experiencing P, of course, but unless they
know you are, they can only guess about the character of your experience.
Before leaving this discussion of perceptual experience, it may be
useful to see how a familiar (to philosophers) scenario plays out on this
account. What Jackson's (1986) Mary does not have before she emerges
from her colorless room is an awareness of red (or of any other color).
Assuming that colors are objective properties (if they aren't, we don't
need Jackson's argument to refute materialism; (1) and (2) will do the

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job), Mary knows all about tomatoes that they are red (P) and she
knows all about what goes on in other people's heads when they see red
objects (there is something in their brain that has the property 9$), but
she does not herself have internal states of this sort. If she did, she would,
contrary to hypothesis, be p-aware of (she would actually experience)
the color red. Once she walks outside the room, objects (es) in her head
acquire ^3 she becomes p-aware of red. She is now aware of things
(i.e., p-aware of colors) she was not previously aware of. Using our
present distinctions to express Jackson's point, the question posed is not
whether Mary is now aware of something she was not previously aware
of (of course she is; she is now ^-aware of colors), but whether Mary is
now ^aware of things that she was not previously ^aware of. The
answer, on the present account of things, is No. 14 Mary always knew
that ripe tomatoes were red (P) and that ripe tomato experiences were
^3 - viz., awarenesses of red. There are no other relevant facts for her to
become aware of (although there are now ways of expressing these facts
that were not previously available to her15). Emerging from the colorfree room gives her an awareness of properties (P) that figure in the facts
(that o is P) she was already aware of, but it doesn't give her an awareness
of any new facts.
We have now taken the first step in this account of the mind's
awareness of itself. In a way that is consistent with both (1) and (2) and
in a way that preserves the essential features of the mind's awareness of
itself (the psychological immediacy and epistemically privileged character
of this awareness) we have an account at least the broad outlines of
one of how we are aware of our own experiences of the world. What
remains to be done is to see whether this account can be generalized to
all mental states. My efforts at generalization (3) will be feeble. I can, at
this point, do little more than gesture in what I take to be the appropriate directions. I close (in 4) with a mildly interesting implication of this
account of self-awareness.

14 There is the fact that she now occupies states having $ , but this doesn't count since this
fact wasn't a fact until she recovered her color vision. What Mary doesn't know is
supposed to be a fact about the world as it existed before she recovered her color vision.
15 The fact she was formerly aware of that she expressed as "Experience t is a ^-awareness
of red" can now (now that she is /j-aware of red) be expressed as "Experience e is a pawareness of this."

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3. PAINS, FEELINGS, EMOTIONS, AND MOODS

Up to this point I have focused exclusively on conscious perceptual

experiences, mental episodes that are of things whatever objects and
properties we are, in having the experience, made aware of. Perceptual
experiences are being identified with internal states having properties
(e.g., ${$) that make them ^-awarenesses, experiences, of the properties
(e.g., P) that external objects have. Something, e, in my head having the
property ^3 (a property that is not movement) constitutes my awareness
of movement (P). I can become f-aware that something in me has ^3 by
an awareness of P. If C's having ^S is caused by a pumpkin having P (i.e.,
by the movement of a pumpkin), then I am aware of a pumpkin's
movement. I see it move. If there is no such object, I am aware of
movement without being aware of any moving object and, thus, without being aware of any object's movement. I hallucinate about or visualize movement.
This account works nicely enough for phenomenal experiences that
are, in some ordinary sense, of or about things (mental states the having
of which makes us perceptually aware of things). For this reason it is
tempting to try extending the account to mental states that are, in some
related (but, perhaps, different) sense, also of or about things: beliefs,
desires, intentions, hopes, and, in general, the propositional attitudes.
Just as my experience of movement has a property that makes it a pawareness of movement, perhaps my belief (i.e., my ^/-awareness) that
some object, o, is moving is, likewise, an internal state having a property,
83 (not itself movement), a property the having of which makes an
internal state into a conceptual representation or depiction (i.e., a n / awareness) of movement. Just as the English word "movement" need
not itself be moving in order to figure in a representation (a sentence,
for example) of something as moving, so too, perhaps, there are symbols
(concepts?) in the head that do not (or need not) have the properties
they represent objects as having. If this were so, then thoughts, just like
experiences, would be mental states that would not (or need not) have
the properties we become^/-aware of in having these thoughts.
If this were so, then we could tell the same story about awareness of
these states that we told about our^awareness of perceptual experiences.
We become ^aware that we are having thoughts about movement
(internal states with 83) by actually thinking about movement. It is the
movement we think about the content of our thought - that (when

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we introspect) "tells us" what we are thinking about and, hence, if we

understand what thinking amounts to, that we are thinking about movement (not color or shape). Just as I reach the ^-awareness that I am
experiencing movement from a ^-awareness of movement, so too I
reach an^awareness that I am thinking that o moves from an^-awareness
that o is moving.16
I will not pursue this line of thought any further here since it seems
like a more or less obvious extension of the present theory, and there
are much more difficult problems to face. Unlike the propositional
attitudes there are a great many mental states (emotions, moods, and so
forth) that, unlike experiences and thoughts (both of which seem representational at some level), do not, at least not on the surface, make us
aware of anything (either of objects, properties, or facts). And it is these
states that pose the real problem for the present account. When I am
hungry, have a splitting headache, or am depressed, for instance, I seem
to be aware of mental objects (the hunger, the ache, the depression) and
their properties (the headache is splitting, the hunger gnawing, the depression constant). Surely in such cases I am aware not only of the fact that I
have certain feelings or am in a certain mood, but also of the feelings
and moods themselves - the pain, the hunger, the depression.
This, I concede, is a natural way to talk about feelings, emotions, and
moods. What I think worth questioning, though, is whether this way of
talking doesn't embody a confusion between awareness of something (an
act) and the something of which we are aware (the object of that act) - a
confusion that is fostered by a failure to distinguish between the different
things we can be aware of. Why suppose, for instance, that feelings of
hunger are internal mental objects (i.e., conditions, states) we are oaware of and not awarenesses (i.e., experiences) of certain internal (nonmental) objects - a chemical state of the blood, say? Just as we conceived
of visual experiences as internal states having the property of being
awarenesses of P (for some P of an external o), why can't hunger be
similarly conceived of as an internal experience (a ^-awareness) of the
properties of an internal o? Why can't an itch in one's arm be thought of
not as something in the arm (brain?) one is o-aware of, but an oawareness (in the head) of a physical state of the arm? Why can't we,
16 Of course, if o isn't in fact moving, then I can't be^aware that it is moving. It merely
seemsim some doxastic sense of "seems" that is distinct from the phenomenal) that o is
moving.

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following Damasio (1994), conceive of emotions, feelings, and moods as

perception of chemical, hormonal, visceral, and musculoskeletal states of
the body?
This way of thinking about pains, itches, tickles, and other bodily
sensations puts them in exactly the same category as the experiences we
have when we are made perceptually aware of our environment. The
only difference is that bodily sensations are the experiences we have of
objects in the body (the stomach, the head, the joints, etc.), not objects
outside the body. What gives these sensations their phenomenal character, the qualities we use, subjectively, to individuate them, are the
properties these experiences are experiences of, the properties (of various
parts of the body) that these experiences make us p-aware of (irritation,
inflammation, time of onset, injury, strain, distention, intensity, chemical
imbalance, and so on). What gives a (veridical) visual experience of an
orange pumpkin its particular quality ($$) are the qualities of the pumpkin (viz., P) that this experience (in virtue of being ^3) is an experience
of. Likewise, what gives headaches their particular quality (what distinguishes them from pains in the back, itches, thirst, anger, or fear) are the
properties (and these include locational properties) that these experiences
are ^-awarenesses of. Just as one becomes aware of external objects in
having visual and olfactory experiences, so one becomes aware of various
parts of the body (and the properties of these parts) in having bodily
sensations for example, pain. Having a headache is not an awareness certainly not an o-awareness of a mental entity: a pain in the head.
The only awareness one has of pain is an/-awareness that one has it. In
saying that one feels pain, what one is really saying is not that one is oaware of something mental (viz., a pain), but that one feels (is aware of)
a part of the body the feeling (awareness) of which is painful (is pain).
Once again, the phenomenal qualities (= qualia) of these mental states
are not the properties of those parts of the body one becomes ^-aware
of in occupying these states. They are, instead, awarenesses (= ) of
these properties (P). We do not have to be aware of the state () itself
(or its properties ) to be aware authoritatively aware that we
occupy a state of that phenomenal kind. P gives our conscious awareness
its phenomenal character and tells us what kind of experience we are
having.
But can such an account possibly work for all experiences - for love
and hatred, joy and depression, ennui and anxiety? Even if such feelings
are not all properly classified as "experiences," they all seem to have an
associated phenomenology that calls out for explanation. Can what-it-is-

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like to have these feelings or experiences always be interpreted (using

the model of perceptual experiences) not as internal objects we are oaware of, but as awarenesses of the properties of internal objects? Can
the entire phenomenology of the conscious mind be boiled down to the
properties (of bodily parts and external objects) that we are p-aware of
in having these experiences?
Whether it can or not, this is clearly the direction suggested by our
analysis of perceptual experience. It may turn out, of course, that even
if our account of perceptual experience is on target, perceptual experiences are unique. Other feelings, moods, and emotions - itches, pains,
hunger, anger, jealousy, pleasure, and anxiety may have a phenomenal
character that they get from other sources. If the story I have told about
perceptual experience is plausible, though, it is tempting to try extending
it to other qualia-laden mental states along similar lines. I leave the
argument that it can be so extended to another time.
4. PREREQUISITES OF SELF-AWARENESS
F-awareness, unlike p-awareness and o-awareness, requires an understanding of what one is aware of.17 One cannot be^aware that o is an
apple without understanding, at some conceptual level, what an apple
is. If a child (or an animal) doesn't know what an apple is, this does not
prevent it from being o-aware of apples or ^-aware of their properties
(this presumably happens when the child is a few months old), but it
prevents it from beings-aware that the apples (she is o-aware of) are
apples.
Since the account developed in 2 and 3 identifies our awareness of
our own (not to mention everyone else's) experiences with^awareness,
it requires of anyone aware of the 9$ quality of her own experience an
understanding, a conceptual grasp, of the property ^3 (and, thus, at some
level of specificity, of P that e's having 9$ is an awareness of). If S doesn't
know what it is to be ^S, then even if S has a ^-experience (i.e., an
experience of P), S cannot be aware of this. S will be "blind" to it.
Since the mind's awareness of itself is always (according to this account)

17 I take^awareness (of the fact) that o is P to imply knowledge (of the fact) that o is P and
the latter to imply belief that o is P. Belief, in turn, requires possession of concepts
corresponding to the (obliquely) occurring expressions (i.e., "P") in the factive clause that
specifies what is believed. Hence, one cannot be ^-aware that o is P without possessing
the (or a) concept corresponding to P.

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/-awareness, there is no way one can be aware of one's mental states

without having a mastery of relevant concepts. The senses make you
aware (i.e., o-aware and p-aware) of the world (and, if we can generalize,
your own body) before you have developed the concepts needed for
understanding what you are aware of, but, lacking a "mental sense" (a
sense that allows us to become o-aware of the mind and j?-aware of its
properties) we must first develop suitable concepts, those that pick out
properties we are >-aware of, before we can be made conscious of what
transpires in our own minds.
This result may seem mildly paradoxical, so let me take a moment to
dispel the mystery. Imagine a child completely naive about numbers and
shapes who is shown brightly colored geometrical shapes. Possessing
normal eyesight, the child sees differences between these figures in the
sense that the pentagons look (phenomenally) different from the triangles
and squares. How else explain why we could teach her to say "pentagon" when (and only when) she saw a pentagon? In the terminology
we have already introduced for describing these facts, the child (before
learning) is o-aware of circles, squares, and pentagons and p-aware of
their shapes. The child hasn't yet been taught what a circle, a square, or
a pentagon is, so she isn't (yet) /aware of what these figures are, but
that doesn't prevent her from being aware of the figures themselves and
p-aware of their (different) shapes.
Is the child also aware in any sense of what its experience of these
shapes is like, of what it is like to see a pentagon? No. 18 Lacking the
concept of a pentagon (not to mention the concept of awareness), the
only awareness the child has when she sees a pentagon is an awareness of
the pentagon and its shape. She cannot be made aware of her experience
of the pentagon until she develops the resources for understanding, at
some level (see footnote 18), what pentagons are and what it means to
be aware of (experience) them. Only then can she become aware of her
pentagon experiences. In having an experience of a pentagon, the child
is, to be sure, aware (i.e., o-aware) of a pentagon and p-aware of its
distinctive shape. What the child lacks is not a visual awareness (experi18 If the child understands that this figure (a circle) is different from that figure (a square) it
can (assuming it has the concept EXPERIENCE) be aware that its experience of this is
different from its experience of that without being aware at any more determinate level
of what either experience is like. If you can distinguish (by taste) wines, you don't have
to know what feature(s) of the wine you are tasting (i.e., you do not need to be able to
identify wines having that feature) to know that wines differing in that feature taste
different.

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ence) of pentagons, but an awareness of pentagon experiences. Awareness of experience awaits development of the understanding, an understanding of what property the experience is ap-awareness of. If you lack
this understanding, you can still become aware of pentagons (just open
your eyes in a pentagon-infested environment), but you cannot be aware
of your pentagon experiences. It is like awareness of neutrinos. Being
what they are (i.e., unobservable: we do not have a sense organ that
makes us o-aware of them), neutrinos are objects one cannot be aware
of until one learns physics. Unlike pentagons, you have to know what
they are to be aware of them.
The mind becomes aware of itself, of its own conscious experiences,
by a developmental process in which concepts needed for such awareness are acquired. You don't need the concepts of PENTAGON or
EXPERIENCE to experience (e.g., see or feel) pentagons, but you do
need these concepts to become aware of pentagon experiences. As
psychologists are learning (in the case of such concepts as EXPERIENCE), this doesn't happen with children until around the age of four
to five years. In most animals it never happens. The mind is the first indeed, the only thing we are aware with, but it is among the last
things we are aware of.
REFERENCES

Chisholm, R. 1957. Perceiving. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Damasio, A. R . 1994. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. N e w

York: Avon Books.

Dretske, F. 1995. Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/A Bradford
Book.
Frisby, J. P. 1980. Seeing: Illusion, Brain and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hardcastle, V. G. 1994. Psychology's Binding Problem and Possible Neurobiological
Solutions. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1:1, pp. 66-90.

Jackson, F. 1986. What Mary Didn't Know. The Journal of Philosophy, LXXXIII,
pp.291-295.
Locke, J. 1959. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Ed. A. C. Fraser. N e w

York: Dover Publications. First published in 1689.

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10
What Good Is Consciousness?

If consciousness is good for something, conscious things must differ in

some causally relevant way from unconscious things. If they do not,
then, as Davies and Humphreys conclude, too bad for consciousness:
"psychological theory need not be concerned with this topic." 1
Davies and Humphreys are applying a respectable metaphysical idea the idea, namely, that if an object's having a property does not make a
difference to what that object does, if the object's causal powers are in
no way enhanced (or diminished) by its possession of this property, then
nothing the object does can be explained by its having that property. A
science dedicated to explaining the behavior of such objects would not
have to concern itself with that property. That is why being an uncle is
of no concern to the psychology (let alone the physics) of uncles. I am
an uncle, yes, but my being so does not (causally speaking)2 enable (or
prevent) me to do anything I would not otherwise be able to do. The
fact that I am an uncle (to be distinguished, of course, from my believing
I am an uncle) does not explain anything I do. From the point of view
Reprinted from Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27(1) (March 1997), 1-15, by permission of
the publisher.
1 Davies and Humphreys (1993), 4-5
2 There is a sense in which it enables me to do things I would not otherwise be able to do e.g., bequeath my books to my nephews and nieces but (I hope it is obvious) this is not
a causal sense of "enable." My having nephews and nieces is necessary for my bequeathing
my books to them, but nothing I do in bequeathing my books to them would I be disabled
from doing if I did not have nephews and nieces (i.e., if I weren't an uncle). The result (of
what I do) would just not be describable in this way if I were not an uncle.
I hope the distinction between causal and other senses of "enable" is sufficiently
intuitive to let me proceed without supplying an analysis. I'm not sure I could.

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of understanding human behavior, then, the fact that some humans are
uncles is epiphenomenal. If consciousness is like that if it is like being
an uncle then, for the same reason, psychological theory need not be
concerned with it. It has no purpose, no function. No good comes from
being conscious.
Is this really a worry? Should it be a worry? The journals and books,
I know, are full of concern these days about the role of consciousness.3
Much of this concern is generated by startling results in neuropsychology
(more of this later). But is there a real problem here? Can there be a
serious question about the advantages, the benefits, the good of being
conscious? I don't think so. It seems to me that the flurry of interest in
the function of consciousness betrays a confusion about several quite
elementary distinctions. Once the distinctions are in place and there is
nothing especially arcane or tricky about them - the advantages (and,
therefore, the good) of consciousness is obvious.
1. THE FIRST DISTINCTION: CONSCIOUS BEINGS VS.
CONSCIOUS STATES
Stones are not conscious, but we are.4 So are many animals. We are not
only conscious (full stop), we are conscious of things of objects (the
bug in my soup), events (the commotion in the hall), properties (the
color of his tie), and facts (that someone is following me). Using Rosenthal's (1990) terminology, I will call all these creature consciousness. In
this sense the word is applied to beings who lose and regain consciousness and are conscious of things and that things are so.
Creature consciousness is to be distinguished from what Rosenthal
calls state consciousness the sense in which certain mental states, processes, events, and activities (in or of conscious beings) are said to be
either conscious or unconscious. When we describe desires, fears, and
experiences as being conscious or unconscious we attribute or deny
consciousness not to a being, but to some state, condition, or process in
that being. States (processes, etc.), unlike the creatures in whom they

3
4

For recent expressions of interest, see Velmans (1991), Rey (1988), and Van Gulick (1989).
I here ignore dispositional senses of the relevant terms - the sense in which we say of
someone or something that it is a conscious being even if, at the time we describe it this
way, it is not (in any occurrent sense) conscious. So, for example, in the dispositional sense,
I am a conscious being even during dreamless sleep.

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occur, are not conscious of anything or that anything is so, although we

can be conscious of them and (more of this in 2) their occurrence in a
creature may make that creature conscious of something.
That is the distinction. How does it help with our question? I'll say
how in a moment, but before I do, I need to make a few things explicit
about my use of relevant terms. I have discovered that not everyone
talks the way I do when they talk about consciousness. So let me say
how I talk. My language is, I think, entirely standard (I use no technical
terms), but just in case my readers talk funny, I want them to know
how I (and, I hope, other ordinary folk) talk about these matters.
For purposes of this discussion and in accordance with most dictionaries I regard "conscious" and "aware" as synonyms. Being conscious of
a thing (or fact) is being aware of it. Alan White (1964) describes
interesting differences between the ordinary use of "aware" and "conscious." He also describes the different liaisons they have to noticing,
attending, and realizing. Although my use of these expressions as synonymous for present purposes blurs some of these distinctions, I think
nothing essential to this topic is lost by ignoring the nuances.
I assume, furthermore, that seeing, hearing, smelling, and so on are
sensory or perceptual forms of consciousness. Consciousness is the genus;
seeing, hearing, and smelling are species (the traditional five sense modalities are not, of course, the only species of consciousness). Seeing is
visual awareness. Hearing is auditory awareness. Smelling burning toast
is becoming aware - in an olfactory way - of burning toast. One might
also see the burning toast. And feel it. These are other modalities of
awareness, other ways of being conscious of the toast.5 You may not pay
much attention to what you see, smell, or hear, but if you see, smell, or
hear it, you are conscious of it.
This is important. I say that if you see, smell, or hear it, you are
conscious of it. The "it" refers to what you are aware of (the burning
toast), not that you are aware of it. When one is aware of burning toast,
there are two ways one might fail to be aware that one is aware of it.
First, one might know one is aware of something, but not know what

I here ignore disputes about whether, in some strict sense, we are really aware of objects
or only (in smell) odors emanating from them or (in hearing) voices or noises they make. I
shall always take the perceptual object - what it is we see, hear, or smell (if there is such
an object) - to be some external physical object or condition. I will not be concerned with
just what object or condition this is.

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it is. "What is that I smell?" is the question of a person who might well
be aware of (i.e., smell) burning toast without being aware that it is
burning toast he is aware of. Second, even if one knows what it is one
is aware of- knows that it is burning toast one might not understand
what it means to be aware of it, might not, therefore, be aware that one
is aware of it. A small child or an animal someone who lacks the
concept of awareness - can be conscious of (i.e., smell) burning toast
without ever being aware that they are aware of something. Even if she
happens to know that it (i.e., what she is aware of) is burning toast, she
may not, therefore, be aware - that she is aware of it.
The language here is a bit tricky, so let me give another example.
One can be aware of (e.g., hear) a French horn without being aware
that that is what it is. One might think it is a trombone or (deeply
absorbed in one's work) not be paying much attention at all (but later
remember hearing it). If asked whether you hear a French horn, you
might well (falsely) deny it or (more cautiously) say that you don't
know. Not being aware that you are aware of a French horn does not
mean you are not aware of a French horn. Hearing a French horn is
being conscious of a French horn. It is not - not necessarily anyway - to
be aware that it is a French horn or aware that you are aware of it. Mice
who hear - and thus become auditorily aware of - French horns never
become aware that they are aware of French horns.6
So, once again, when I say that if you see, hear, or smell something
you must be conscious of it, the "it" refers to what you are aware of
(burning toast, a French horn), not what it is (i.e., that it is burning toast,
a French horn) you are aware or that you are aware of it. Animals (not
to mention human infants) are presumably aware of a great many things
(they see, smell, and feel the things around them). Often, though, they
are not aware of what it is they are aware of and seldom (if ever) are
they aware that they are aware of it.
So much for terminological preliminaries. I have not yet (I hope) said
anything that is controversial. Nonetheless, with only these meager

In saying this I assume two things, both of which strike me as reasonably obvious: (1) to
be aware that you are aware of a French horn requires some understanding of what
awareness is (not to mention an understanding of what French horns are); and (2) mice
(even if we give them some understanding of French horns) do not understand what
awareness is. They do not, that is, have the concept of awareness.

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resources, we are in a position to usefully divide our original question

into two more manageable parts. Questions about the good, the purpose, or the function of consciousness can be questions either about
creature consciousness or about state consciousness. I will, for the rest of
this section, take them to be questions about creature consciousness. I
return to state consciousness in the next section.
If, then, we take our question about the good of consciousness as a
question about creature consciousness, about the advantages that consciousness affords the animals who are conscious, the answer would
appear to be obvious. If animals could not see, hear, smell, and taste the
objects in their environment if they were not (in these ways) conscious
how could they find food and mates, avoid predators, build nests, spin
webs, get around obstacles, and, in general, do the thousand things that
have to be done in order to survive and reproduce?
Let an animal a gazelle, say who is aware of prowling lions
where they are and what they are doing compete with one who is not
and the outcome is predictable. The one who is conscious will win
hands down. Reproductive prospects, needless to say, are greatly enhanced by being able to see and smell predators. That, surely, is an
evolutionary answer to questions about the benefits of creature consciousness.7 Take away perception - as you do when you remove consciousness and you are left with a vegetable. You are left with an
eatee, not an eater. That is why the eaters of the world (most of them
anyway) are conscious.
This answer is so easy that I expect to be told that I'm not really
answering the question everyone is asking. I will surely be told that
questions about the function of consciousness are not questions about
why we conscious beings are conscious. It is not a question about
the biological advantage of being able to see, hear, smell, and feel (thus,
being conscious of) the things around us. It is, rather, a question about
state consciousness, a question about why there are conscious states,

This is not to say that consciousness is always advantageous. As Georges Rey reminds me,
some tasks playing the piano, pronouncing language, and playing sports are best
performed when the agent is largely unaware of the performatory details. Nonetheless,
even when one is unconscious of the means, consciousness of the end (e.g., the basket into
which one is trying to put the ball, the net into which one is trying to hit the puck, the
teammate to whom one is trying to throw the ball) is essential. You don't have to be aware
of just how you manage to backhand the shot to do it skillfully, but, if you are going to be
successful in backhanding the puck into the net, you have to be aware of the net (where it
is).

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processes, and activities in conscious creatures. Why, for instance, do

conscious beings have conscious experiences and thoughts?
2. THE SECOND DISTINCTION: OBJECTS VS. ACTS OF
AWARENESS

If our question is one about the benefits of conscious states, then, of

course, we have preliminary work to do before we start answering it.
We have to get clear about what a conscious state is. What makes an
experience, a thought, a desire conscious? We all have a pretty good
grip on what a conscious animal is. It is one that is via some perceptual
modality aware of things going on around (or in) it. There are surely
modes of awareness, ways of being conscious, that we do not know
about and will never ourselves experience. We do not, perhaps, understand bat phenomenology or what it is like for a dogfish to sense its prey
electrically. But we do understand the familiar modalities seeing,
hearing, tasting, and so on and these, surely, qualify as ways of being
conscious. So I understand, at a rough and ready level, what someone is
talking about when she talks about a creature's being conscious in one
of these ways. But what does it mean to speak not of an animal's being
conscious in one of these ways, but of some state, process, or activity in
the animal as being conscious? States, remember, aren't conscious of
anything. They are just conscious (or unconscious) full stop. What kind
of property is this? Until we understand this, we won't be in a position
to even speculate about what the function of a conscious state is.
There are, as far as I can see, only two options for making sense out
of state consciousness. Either a state is made conscious by (1) its being
an object or (2) its being an act of creature consciousness. A state of
creature S is an object of creature consciousness by S being conscious of
it. A state of S is an act of creature consciousness, on the other hand, not
by S being aware of it, but by S being made aware (so to speak) with it by its occurrence in S making (i.e., constituting) S's awareness of something (e.g., an external object). When state consciousness is identified
with a creature's acts of awareness, the creature need not be aware of
these states for them to be conscious. What makes them conscious is not
S's awareness of them, but their role in making S conscious - typically
(in the case of sense perception), of some external object.
Consider the second possibility first. On this option, a conscious
experience is one that makes an animal conscious (of whatever the
experience is an experience of). When a gazelle sees a lion, its visual

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experience of the lion qualifies as a conscious experience, a conscious

state, because it makes, or helps make,8 the gazelle visually conscious of
the lion. Without this experience the gazelle would not see the lion.
There are, to be sure, states of (processes and activities in) the gazelle
that are not themselves conscious but that are nonetheless necessary to
make the animal (visually) aware of the lion. Without photoreceptors
(eyes) and the various states of these receptors, the animal would not see
anything would not, therefore, be visually aware of the lion. Yet,
these electrical and chemical events occurring in the retina are not
conscious. This is true enough, but it is irrelevant to an act conception
of conscious experience. According to an act conception of state consciousness, a conscious visual state is one that (in the case of lions) is
necessary to the awareness of lions and sufficient for the awareness of
those aspects, features, or properties (color, shape, movement, etc.) that
seeing (or hallucinating) lions makes one aware of. The eyes may be
necessary for the gazelle to be conscious of external objects (i.e., lions),
but they are not necessary for the gazelle to be aware of those leonine
properties that seeing lions make it aware of. That is why, on an act
account of state consciousness, the processes in early vision, those occurring in the retina and optic nerve, are not conscious. They may be
necessary to a creature's visual awareness of external objects, but they are
not essential to creature awareness of properties. Even without a functional optical system, the creature can still dream about or hallucinate
the things it can no longer see. The same acts of awareness can still
occur. They just do not have the same (according to some, they don't
have any) objects.
If we agree about this agree, that is, that conscious experiences are
internal states that make creatures conscious of things (typically, in the
case of sense perception, of external objects) - then the function, the
good, of state consciousness becomes evident. It is to make creatures
conscious, and if (see 1) there is no problem about why animals are
conscious, then, on the act conception of conscious states, there is no
problem about why states are conscious. Their function is to make
creatures conscious. Without state consciousness, there is no creature
consciousness. If there is a biological advantage in gazelles being aware
of prowling lions, then there is a purpose in gazelles having conscious

In the case of external objects (like lions) the experience is necessary, but not sufficient, for
awareness of (seeing) the lion. We also need a lion, of course, and whatever causal relations
between the lion and the experience are required to make the experience of the lion.

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experiences. The purpose is to enable the gazelle to see, hear, and smell
the lions.
I do not expect many people to be impressed with this result. I expect
to be told that internal states are conscious not (as I have suggested) if
the animal is conscious with them, but, rather, if the animal (in whom
they occur) is conscious of them. A conscious state is conscious in virtue
of being an object, not an act, of creature awareness. A state becomes
conscious, according to this orthodox line of thinking, when it becomes
the object of some higher-order act, a thought or experience. Conscious
states are not states that make the creatures in whom they occur conscious; it is the other way around: creatures make the states that occur
in them conscious by becoming conscious of them.
Since, according to this account, the only way a state can become an
object of consciousness is if there are higher-order acts (i.e., thoughts or
experiences) that take it as their object, this account of what makes a
state conscious has come to be called an H O (for higher-order) theory
of consciousness. It has several distinct forms, but all versions agree that
an animal's experience (of lions, say) remains unconscious (or, perhaps,
nonconscious) until the animal becomes aware of it. A higher-order
awareness of one's lion-experience can take the form of a thought (an
H O T theory) - in which case one is aware that (i.e., one thinks that)
one is experiencing a lion - or the form of an experience (an HOE
theory) - in which case one is aware of the lion-experience in something
like the way one is aware of the lion: one experiences one's lionexperience (thus becoming aware of one's lion-experience) in the way
one is aware of (experiences) the lion.
I have elsewhere (Dretske 1993, 1995) criticized H O theories of
consciousness, and I will not repeat myself here. I am more concerned
with what H O theories have to say - if, indeed, they have anything to
say about the good of consciousness. If conscious states are states we
are, in some way, conscious of, why have conscious states? What do
conscious states do that unconscious states don't do? According to H O
theory, we (i.e., creatures) could be conscious of (i.e., see, hear, and
smell) most of the objects and events we are now conscious of (and this
includes whatever bodily conditions we are proprioceptively aware of)
without ever occupying a conscious state. To be in a conscious state is
to be conscious of the state, and since the gazelle, for example, can be
conscious of a lion without being conscious of the internal states that
make it conscious of the lion, it, can be conscious of the lion that is,
see, smell, feel, and hear the lion while occupying no conscious states

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at all. This being so, what is the purpose, the biological point, of
conscious states? It is awareness of the lion, not awareness of lionexperiences, that is presumably useful in the struggle for survival. It is
the lions, not the lion-experiences, that are dangerous.
On an object conception of state consciousness, it is difficult to
imagine how conscious states could have a function. To suppose that
conscious states have a function would be like supposing that conscious
ball bearings that is, ball bearings we are conscious of have a
function. If a conscious ball bearing is a ball bearing we are conscious
of, then conscious ball bearing have exactly the same causal powers as
do the unconscious ones. The causal powers of a ball bearing (as opposed
to the causal powers of the observer of the ball bearing) are in no way
altered by being observed or thought about. The same is true of mental
states like thoughts and experiences. If what makes an experience or a
thought conscious is the fact that S (the person in whom it occurs) is,
somehow, aware of it, then it is clear that the causal powers of the
thought or experience (as opposed to the causal powers of the thinker
or experiencer) are unaffected by its being conscious. Mental states and
processes would be no less effective in doing their job whatever,
exactly, we take that job to be - if they were all unconscious. According
to H O theories of consciousness, then, asking about the function of
conscious states in mental affairs would be like asking about the function
of conscious ball bearings in mechanical affairs.
David Rosenthal (a practicing H O T theorist) has pointed out to me
in correspondence that although experiences do not acquire causal powers by being conscious, there may nonetheless be a purpose served by
their being conscious. The purpose might be served not by the beneficial
effects of a conscious experience (conscious and unconscious experiences
have exactly the same effects, according to H O theories), but by the
effects of the higher-order thoughts that makes the experience conscious.
Although the conscious experiences don't do anything the unconscious
experiences don't do, the creatures in which conscious experiences occur are different as a result of having the higher-order thoughts that
make their (lower-order) experiences conscious. The animals having
conscious experiences is therefore in a position to do things that animals
having unconscious experiences are not. They can, for instance, run
from the lion they (consciously) experience - something they might not
do by having an unconscious experience of the lion. They can do this
because they are (let us say) aware that they are aware of a lion aware

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that they are having a lion-experience.9 Animals in which the experience

of the lion is unconscious, animals in which there is no higher-order
awareness that they are aware of a lion, will not do this (at least not
deliberately). This, then, is an advantage of conscious experience; perhaps who knows? - it is the function of conscious experiences.
I concede the point. But I concede it about ball bearings too. I cannot
imagine conscious ball bearings having a function simply because
conscious ball bearings don't do anything nonconscious ball bearings
don't do - but I can imagine there being some purpose served by our
being aware of ball bearings. If we are aware of them, we can, for
instance, point at them, refer to them, talk about them. Perhaps, then,
we can replace defective ones, something we wouldn't do if we were
not aware of them, and this sounds like a useful thing to do. But this is
something we can do by being aware of them, not something they can
do by our being aware of them. If a conscious experience was an
experience we were aware of, then there would be no difference between conscious and unconscious experiences any more than there
would be a difference between conscious and unconscious ball bearings.
There would simply be a difference in the creatures in whom such
experiences occurred, a difference in what they were aware of.
The fact that some people who have cancer are aware of having it,
while others who have it are not aware of having it, does not mean
there are two types of cancer - conscious and unconscious cancers. For
exactly the same reason, the fact that some people (you and me, for
instance) are conscious of having visual and auditory experiences of lions,
while others (parrots and gazelles, for example) are not, does not mean
that there are two sorts of visual and auditory experiences - conscious
and unconscious. It just means that we are different from parrots and
gazelles. We know things about ourselves that they don't, and it is
sometimes useful to know these things. It does not show that what we
know about our conscious experiences are any different from theirs.
We both have experiences conscious experiences only we are aware
of having them; they are not. Both experiences those of the gazelle
9

I assume here that, according to HOT theories, the higher-order thought one has about a
lion-experience that makes that experience conscious is that it is a lion-experience (an
experience of a lion). This needn't be so (Rosenthal 1991 denies that it is so), but if it isn't
so, it is even harder to see what the good of conscious experiences might be. What good
would be a thought about a lion-experience that it was . . . what? . . . simply an experience?
What good is that?

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and those of a human - are conscious because, I submit, they make the
creature in which they occur aware of things - whatever objects and
conditions are perceived (lions, for instance). Being aware that you are
having such experiences is as irrelevant to the nature of the experience
as it is to the nature of observed ball bearings.10
3. THE THIRD DISTINCTION: OBJECT VS. FACT AWARENESS
Once again, I expect to hear that this is all too quick. Even if one should
grant that conscious states are to be identified with acts, not objects, of
creature awareness, the question is not what the evolutionary advantage
of perceptual belief is, but what the advantage of perceptual (i.e., phenomenal) experience is. What is the point of having conscious experiences of lions (i.e., lion-qualia) as well as conscious beliefs about lions?
Why are we aware of objects (lions) as well as various facts about them
(that they are lions, that they are headed this way)? After all, in the
business of avoiding predators and finding mates, what is important is
not experiencing (e.g., seeing, hearing) objects, but knowing certain
facts about these objects. What is important is not seeing a hungry lion
but knowing (seeing) that it is a lion, hungry, or whatever (with all that
this entails about the appropriate response on the part of lion-edible
objects). Being aware of (i.e., seeing) hungry lions and being aware of
them, simply, as tawny objects or as large, shaggy cats (something a twoyear-old child might do) isn't much use to someone on the lion's dinner
menu. It isn't the objects you are aware of, the objects you see - and,
therefore, the qualia you experience - that is important in the struggle
for survival; it is the facts you are aware of, what you know about what

10 I'm skipping over a difficulty that I should at least acknowledge here. There are a variety
of mental states - urges, desires, intentions, purposes, etc. - that we speak of as conscious
(and unconscious) whose consciousness cannot be analyzed in terms of their being acts
(instead of objects) of awareness since, unlike the sensory states associated with perceptual
awareness (seeing, hearing, and smelling), they are not, or do not seem to be, states of
awareness. If these states are conscious, they seem to be made so by being objects, not acts
of consciousness (see, e.g., van Gulick 1985). I don't have the space to discuss this alleged
difference with the care it deserves. I nonetheless acknowledge its relevance to my present
thesis by restricting my claims about state consciousness to experiences - more particularly,
perceptual experiences. Whatever it is that makes a desire for an apple, or an intention to
eat one, conscious, visual (gustatory, tactile, etc.) experiences of apples are made conscious
not by the creature in whom they occur being conscious of them, but by making the
creature in whom they occur conscious (of apples).

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you see. Being aware of (seeing) poisonous mushrooms (these objects) is

no help to an animal who is not aware of the fact that they are poisonous. It is the representation of the fact that another animal is 2. receptive
mate, not simply the perception of a receptive mate, that is important in
the game of reproduction. As we all know from long experience, it is
no trick at all to see sexually willing (or, as the case may be, unwilling)
members of the opposite sex. The trick is to see which is which to
know that the willing are willing and the others are not. That is the skill
and it is a cognitive skill, a skill involving knowledge of facts that
gives one a competitive edge in sexual affairs. Good eyesight, a discriminating ear, and a sensitive nose (and the assorted qualia associated with
these sense modalities) are of no help in the struggle for survival if such
experiences always (or often) yield false beliefs about the objects perceived. It is the conclusions, the beliefs, the knowledge that is important,
not the qualia-laden experiences that normally give rise to such knowledge. So why do we have phenomenal experience of objects as well as
beliefs about them? Or, to put the same question differently: Why are
we conscious of the objects we have knowledge about?
Still another way of putting this question is to ask why we aren't all,
in each sense modality, the equivalent of blindsighters who appear able
to get information about nearby objects without experiencing (seeing)
the objects.11 In some sense blindsighters seem able to "see" the facts (at
least they receive information about what the facts are - that there is,
say, an X (not an O) on the right without being able to see the objects
(the Xs) on the right. No qualia. No phenomenal experience. If,
therefore, a person can receive the information needed to determine
appropriate action without experience, why don't we?12 Of what use is
11 For more on Hindsight see Weiskrantz (1986) and Milner and Rugg (1992). I here assume
that a subject's (professed) absence of visual experience is tantamount to a claim that he
cannot see objects, that he has no visual experience. The question that blindsight raises is
why one has to see objects (or anything else, for that matter) in order to see facts
pertaining to those objects - what (who, where, etc.) they are. If blindsighters can see
where an object is, the fact that it is there (where they point), without seeing it (the object
at which they point), what purpose is served by seeing it?
12 There are a good many reflexive "sensings" (Walker 1983: 240) that involve no awareness
of the stimulus that is controlling behavior e.g., accommodation of the lens of the eye
to objects at different distances, reactions of the digestive system to internal forms of
stimulation, direction of gaze toward peripherally seen objects. Milner (1992: 143) suggests
that these "perceptions" are probably accomplished by the same midbrain visuomotor
systems that mediate prey catching in frogs and orienting reactions in rats and monkeys.
What is puzzling about blindsight is not that we get information we are not aware of

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phenomenal experience in the game of cognition if the job can be done

without it?
These are respectable questions. They deserve answers scientific,
not philosophical, answers. But the answers at least in a preliminary
way would appear to be available. There are a great many important
facts we cannot be made aware of unless we are, via phenomenal experience, made aware of objects these facts are facts about. There are also
striking behavioral deficits for example, an inability to initiate intentional action with respect to those parts of the world one does not
experience (Marcel 1988). Humphrey (1970, 1972, 1974), worked for
many years with a single monkey, Helen, whose capacity for normal
vision was destroyed by surgical removal of her entire visual cortex.
Although Helen originally gave up even looking at things, she regained
certain visual capacities.
She improved so greatly over the next few years that eventually she could move
deftly through a room full of obstacles and pick up tiny currants from the floor.
She could even reach out and catch a passing fly. Her 3-D spatial vision and her
ability to discriminate between objects that differed in size or brightness became
almost perfect. (Humphrey 1992: 88).
Nonetheless, after six years she remained unable to identify even those
things most familiar to her (e.g., a carrot). She did not recover the ability
to recognize shapes or colors. As Humphrey described Helen in 1977
(Humphrey 1992: 89),
She never regained what we you and I would call the sensations of sight. I
am not suggesting that Helen did not eventually discover that she could after all
use her eyes to obtain information about the environment. She was a clever
monkey and I have little doubt that, as her training progressed, it began to dawn
on her that she was indeed picking up "visual" information from somewhere
and that her eyes had something to do with it. But I do want to suggest that,
even if she did come to realize that she could use her eyes to obtain visual
information, she no longer knew how that information came to her: if there
was a currant before her eyes she would find that she knew its position but,
lacking visual sensation, she no longer saw it as being there. . . . The information
she obtained through her eyes was "pure perceptual knowledge" for which she
was aware of no substantiating evidence in the form of visual sensation. . . .
(these reflexive sensings are all instances of that), but that in the case of blindsight one
appears able to use this information in the control and guidance of deliberate, intentional
action (when put in certain forced choice situations) - the sorts of actions that normally
require awareness.

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If we follow Humphrey and suppose that Helen, although still able to

see where objects were (conceptually represent them as there), was
unable to see them there, had no (visual) experience of them, we have
a clue about what the function of phenomenal experience might be: we
experience (i.e., see, hear, and smell) objects to help in our identification
and recognition of them. Remove visual sensations of X and S might
still be able to tell where X is, but S will not be able to tell what X is.
Helen couldn't. That is or may be a reasonable empirical conjecture
for the purpose of experience for why animals (including humans) are,
via perceptual experience, made aware of objects. It seems to be the
only way or at least a way of being made aware of pertinent facts
about them.
Despite the attention generated by dissociation phenomena, it remains clear that people afflicted with these syndromes are always "deeply
disabled" (Weiskrantz 1991: 8). Unlike Helen, human patients never
recover their vision to anything like the same degree that the monkey
did. Although they do much better than they "should" be able to do,
they are still not very good (see Humphrey 1992: 89). Blindsighted
subjects cannot avoid bumping into lampposts, even if they can guess
their presence or absence in a forced-choice situation. Furthermore,
All these subjects lack the ability to think about or to image the objects that
they can respond to in another mode, or to inter-relate them in space and in
time; and this deficiency can be crippling. (Weiskrantz, 1991: 8)
This being so, there seems to be no real empirical problem about the
function (or at least a function) of phenomenal experience. The function
of experience, the reason animals are conscious of objects and their
properties, is to enable them to do all those things that those who do
not have it cannot do. This is a great deal indeed. If we assume (as it
seems clear from these studies we have a right to assume) that there are
many things people with experience can do that they cannot do without
it, then that is a perfectly good answer to a question about what the
function of experience is. That is why we, and a great many other
animals, are conscious of things and, thus, why, on an act conception of
state consciousness, we have conscious experiences. Maybe something
else besides experience would enable us to do the same things, but this
would not show that experience didn't have a function. All it would
show is that there was more than one way to skin a cat more than one
way to get the job done. It would not show that the mechanisms that
did the job weren't good for something.

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REFERENCES

Davies, M. and G. W. Humphreys. Introduction. M. Davies and G. W. Humphreys,

eds., Consciousness (Oxford: Blackwell 1993) 1-39.
Dretske, F. "Conscious Experience," Mind 102 (1993) 1-21.
. Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1995).
Humphrey, N. "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Monkey's Brain," Brain, Behavior
and Evolution 3 (1970) 324-337.
"Seeing and Nothingness," New Scientist 53 (1972) 682-684.
"Vision in a Monkey Without Striate Cortex: A Case Study," Perception 3 (1974)
241-255.
A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness (New York: Simon

and Schuster 1992).

Marcel, A.J. "Phenomenal Experience and Functionalism." A.J. Marcel and E.
Bisiach, eds. Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford; Clarendon Press,
1988) 121-158.
Milner, A. D. "Disorders of Perceptual Awareness - Commentary" Milner and
Rugg 1992: 139-158.
Milner, A. D. and M. D. Rugg, eds. The Neuropsychology of Consciousness (London:
Academic Press 1992).
Rey, G. "A Question about Consciousness." H. Otto andj. Tuedio, eds., Perspectives
on Mind (Dordrecht: Reidel 1988).
Rosenthal, D. "A Theory of Consciousness." Report No. 40, Research Group on
Mind and Brain, ZiF, University of Bielefeld (1990).
"The Independence of Consciousness and Sensory Quality." E. Villanueva, ed.
Consciousness (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview 1991) 15-36.
van Gulick, R. "Conscious Wants and Self Awareness," The Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 8 (1985) 555-556.
"What Difference Does Consciousness Make?" Philosophical Topics 17 (1989) 211
230.
Velmans, M. "Is Human Information Processing Conscious?" Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 14 (1991) 651-668.
Walker, S. Animal Thought (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1983).
Weiskrantz, L., ed. Blindsight: A Case Study and Implications (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986).
"Introduction: Dissociated Issues." Milner and Rugg 1992: 1-10.
White, A. R. Attention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1964).

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Part Three
Thought and Intentionality

11
Putting Information to Work

Information isn't much good if it doesn't do anything. If the fact that an

event carries information doesn't help explain the event's impact on the
rest of the world, then, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the
event may as well not carry information. To put it bluntly, in the way
positivists liked to put it, a difference that doesn't make a difference isn't
really a difference at all. If an event's carrying information doesn't make
a difference and by a difference here I mean a causal difference, a
difference in the kinds of effects it has then for all philosophical (not
to mention practical) purposes, the event doesn't carry information.
Surely, though, this is not a serious threat. We all know how useful
a commodity information is, how even the smallest scrap can radically
alter the course of human affairs. Think about its role in business,
education, and war. Or consider the consequences of telling Michael
about his wife's passionate affair with Charles. Kaboom! Their lives are
never again the same. A small piece of information dramatically alters a
part (and who knows? maybe eventually the entire course) of world
history. In light of such obvious examples, how can anyone seriously
doubt the causal efficacy of information and, hence, its relevance to
understanding why some things turn out the way they do?
MEANING AND INFORMATION
There is a small subset of the world's objects on which information
appears to have this kind of dramatic effect. These objects are people,
I wish to thank the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford
University, the National Endowment for the Humanities FC-20060-85, and the Andrew
Mellon Foundation for their support during 1987-1988 when this essay was written.

195

objects like you and me, who understand, or think they understand, some
of what is happening around them. Talking to Michael has profound
effects, while talking to rocks and goldfish has little or no effect because
Michael, unlike rocks and goldfish, understands, or thinks he understands, what he is being told. As a consequence, he is - typically at least
brought to believe certain things by these acts of communication. The
rocks and the goldfish, on the other hand, are impervious to meaning.
Instead of inducing belief, all we succeed in doing by remonstrating with
such objects is jostling them a bit with the acoustic vibrations we produce.
So appearances may be deceptive. It may turn out that the difference
between Michael and a goldfish isn't that Michael, unlike a goldfish,
responds to information, but that Michael, unlike a goldfish, has beliefs,
beliefs about what sounds mean (or about what the people producing
these sounds mean), and which therefore (when he hears these sounds)
induce beliefs on which he acts. These beliefs are, to be sure, sometimes
aroused in him by sounds that actually carry information. Nevertheless,
if these beliefs in no way depend on the information these sounds carry,
then the information carried by the belief-eliciting stimulation is explanatorily irrelevant. After all, rocks and goldfish are also affected by information-carrying signals. When I talk to a rock, the rock is, as I said,
jostled by acoustic vibrations. But the point is that although my utterances, the ones that succeed in jostling the rock, carry information, the
information they carry is irrelevant to their effect on the rock. The
information in this stimulation doesn't play any explanatory role in
accounting for the rock's response to my communication. From the
rock's point of view, my utterance may as well not carry information.
Subtract the information (without changing the physical properties of
the signal carrying this information) and the effect is exactly the same.
And so it may be with Michael. To find out, as we did with the
rock, whether information is doing any real work, we merely apply
Mill's Method of Difference. Take away the information, leaving everything else as much the same as possible, and see if the effect on Michael
changes. As we all know, we needn't suppose that his wife, Sandra, is
actually having an affair with Charles to get a reaction in fact, the very
same reaction from Michael. He will react in exactly the same way if
his alleged informant is lying or is simply mistaken about Sandra's affair.
As long as the act of communication is the same, as long as what the
speaker says and does means the same thing (to Michael), it will elicit the

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same reaction from him. What is said doesn't have to be true to get this
effect. Michael just has to think it true. Nothing, in fact, need even be
said. As long as Michael thinks it was (truly) said, as long as he thinks
something with this meaning occurred, the result will be the same.
In saying that it is Michael's beliefs, not the meaning (if any) or
information (if any) in the stimuli giving rise to these beliefs, that causally
explains Michael's behavior, I am assuming that we can (and should)
make appropriate distinctions between these ideas between information, meaning, and belief. Some people, I know, use these notions
interchangeably. That is too bad. It confuses things that should be kept
distinct. According to this careless way of talking (especially prevalent, I
think, among computer scientists), information is meaning or (at least) a
species of meaning, and a belief (or a reasonable analog of a belief) just
is an internal state having the requisite kind of meaning. So, for instance,
anything that means that Michael's wife is having an affair carries this
piece of information. If I say his wife is having an affair, then my
utterance, whether or not it is true, carries this information. And if I enter
this "information" into a suitably programmed computer, then, whether
or not Sandra is unfaithful, the "fact" that she is unfaithful becomes part
of the machine's "data base," the "information" on which it relies to
reason, make inferences, answer questions, and solve problems. The
computer now "thinks" that Michael's wife is having an affair. Michael
doesn't even have to be married for the machine to be given the "data,"
the "information," that, as it were, his wife is having an affair. On this
usage, the facts, the information, the data, are what we say they are.
It is perfectly understandable why computer scientists (not to mention
a good many other people) prefer to talk this way. After all, it is natural
to suppose that a computer (or a human brain, for that matter) is
insensitive to the truth of the representations on which it operates. Put
the sentence " P " in a machine's (or a human brain's) data file, and it
will operate with those data in exactly the same way whether " P " is
true or false, whether it is information or misinformation. From the
machine's (brain's) point, of view, anything in it that qualifies as a belief
qualifies as knowledge, anything in it that means that P is information that
P. The distinction between meaning and information, between belief
and knowledge, is a distinction that makes sense only from the outside.
But what makes sense only from the outside of the machine or person
whose behavior is being explained cannot (according to this way of
thinking) help to explain that machine's (or person's) behavior. It cannot

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because the machine (or person) can't get outside of itself to make the
needed discriminations. So, for practical explanatory purposes, meaning
15 (or may as well be) information.
Whatever the practical exigencies may be, something that makes
sense only from the outside is, nonetheless, something that makes perfectly good sense. It certainly should make perfectly good sense to those
of us (on the outside) talking about such systems. Something (like a
statement) that means that Michael's wife is having an affair need not
carry this information. It needn't carry this information either because
Michael's wife is not having an affair or because, although she is, the
words or symbols used to make this statement are being used in a way
that is quite unrelated to her activities. I can say anything I like, that
Mao Tse Tung liked chocolate ice cream for instance, and the words I
utter will mean something quite definite in this case that Mao Tse
Tung liked chocolate ice cream. But these words, even if they are (by
some lucky accident) true, won't carry the information that Mao liked
chocolate ice cream. They won't because the sentence, used merely as
an example and in total ignorance of Mao's preferences in ice cream, in
no way depends on Mao's likes and dislikes. These words mean something, but they do not, not at least when coming from me, inform the
listener. I might succeed in getting you to believe that Mao liked
chocolate ice cream. I might, by telling you this, misinform you about
his taste in ice cream. But misinformation is not a species of information
any more than belief is a species of knowledge.
So, at least on an ordinary understanding of information and meaning,
something can mean that P without thereby carrying the information
that P. And someone can believe that P without ever having received
the information that P. Often enough, what makes people believe that
P is being told that P by someone they trust. Sometimes these communications carry information. Sometimes they do not. Their efficacy in
producing belief resides, however, not in the fact that the utterance
carries information, but in its meaning (or perceived meaning), who
uttered it, and how. No successful liar can seriously doubt this.
So if we distinguish between an event's meaning (= what it says,
whether truly or falsely, about another state of affairs) and the information
it carries (what it, among other things, truly says about another state of
affairs), a distinction that is roughly equivalent to Grice's (1957) distinction between nonnatural and natural meaning, the causal role of information becomes more problematic. What explains Michael's reaction to
the verbal communication is his believing that his wife was having an

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affair with Charles. What explains his believing this is his being told it
by a trusted confidant that is, his hearing someone (he trusts) say this,
utter words with this meaning. At no point in the explanatory proceedings do we have to mention the truth of what is said, the truth of what
is believed, or the fact that information (as opposed to misinformation)
was communicated. If Michael acts on his belief, he may, sooner or later,
confront a situation that testifies to the truth of what he believes (and
was told). He will then, presumably, acquire new beliefs about his wife
and Charles, and these new beliefs will help determine what further
reactions he has, what he goes on to do. But still, at no point do we
have to speak of information or truth in our explanations of Michael's
behavior. All that is needed is what Michael thinks is true, what he thinks
is information, what he believes. Knowing whether these beliefs are true
or not may be helpful in predicting the results of his actions (whether,
for instance, he will actually find Sandra at home when he goes to look),
but it is not essential for explaining and predicting what he will actually
do whether, that is, he will go home to look.
Appearances, then, do seem to be misleading. Despite the way things
first looked, despite a variety of familiar examples in which information
seemed to make a causal difference, we still haven't found an honest job
for it, something information (as opposed to meaning or belief) does
that constitutes its special contribution to the causal story.
TRUTH AND SUPERVENIENCE
It isn't hard to see why there is trouble finding a decent job for information. The information a signal (structure, event, condition, state of
affairs) carries is a function of the way a signal is related to other conditions in the world. I have my own views (Dretske 1981) about what
these relations come down to, what relations constitute information. I
happen to think information requires, among other things, some relation
of dependency between the signal and the condition about which it
carries information. Signals don't carry information about conditions,
even conditions that happen to obtain, on which their occurrence does
not depend in some appropriate way. But it isn't necessary to argue
about these details. I'm not asking you to agree with me about exactly
what information is to agree with me that, whatever it is, as long as it
(unlike meaning) involves truth, there is a special problem about how it
can be put to work in a scientifically respectable way how it, or the
fact that something carries it, can be made explanatorily relevant.

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In order to appreciate the problem it is enough to realize that since

no signal, S, can carry the information that P is the case when P is not
the case, you can change the information a signal carries by tinkering
not with the signal itself, but with the condition, P, about which it
carries information. If it is possible, as it almost always is (by tinkering
with the causal mechanisms mediating P and S), to change P without
changing the character of S itself (i.e., without changing any of S's
nonrelational properties), then the fact that S carries information is a fact
that does not (to use a piece of current jargon) supervene on its nonrelational (intrinsic) properties. Signals that are otherwise identical can be
informationally different. They will be informationally different when
one occurs when P is the case, while the other, a physical clone of the
first, occurs when P is not the case.1 But if this is so, and we assume, as
it seems we must assume (more of this in a moment), that the causal
powers of a signal are embodied in, and exhausted by, its nonrelational
properties (so that two signals that are physically identical are, in the
same circumstances, causally equivalent), then the information character
of a signal, the fact that it carries information, is causally inert. However
useful it might be (because of the correlations it exhibits) as a predictor
of correlated (even lawfully correlated)2 conditions, the fact that a signal
carries information will explain absolutely nothing. The fact that a signal
carries the information that P cannot possibly explain anything if a signal
lacking this information has exactly the same effects. This is not to say
that signals bearing information cannot cause things. Certainly they can.
It just means that their carrying information does not help explain why

It is better to say that under such conditions they can be informationally different. Whether
they are different will depend not only on whether P exists in one case but not the other,
but on whether there is, in the case where P exists, the required information-carrying
dependency between P and the signal.
In "common cause" situations, cases where A, although neither the cause nor the effect of
B, is correlated with B because they have some common cause C, we may (depending on
the details of the case) be able to say that B would not have happened unless A happened
and, yet, deny that A in any way explains (causally or otherwise) B. An explanatory relation
between A and B, a relation that lets us say that B happened because A happened, requires
more than counterfactual-supporting generalizations between A and B.
I disagree, therefore, with Jerry Fodor (1987: 139-140) that (to put it crudely) an
adequate story can be told about mental causation without making intentional properties
(like meaning or information) determine causal roles. It isn't enough to have these intentional properties (like meaning or information) determine causal roles. It isn't enough to
have these intentional properties figure in counterfactual-supporting generalizations. That
(alone) won't show that people behave the way they do because of what they believe and
desire.

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they cause what they cause. Distilled water will extinguish a fire
thereby causing exactly what undistilled water causes but the fact that
the water is distilled does not figure in the explanation of why the fire is
extinguished. It won't because undistilled water has exactly the same
effects on flames. And if the information in a signal is like this, like the
fact that water is distilled, then the fact that a signal carries information
is as explanatorily relevant to its effects on a receiver as is the fact that
the water is distilled to its effects on a flame.3
Coupled with the idea that a symbol's meaning is a function of its
relations to other conditions (the conditions it, in some sense, signifies
or means), such arguments have led to the view that it is the form,
shape, or syntax not the meaning, content, or semantics of our
internal states that ultimately pulls the levers, turns the gears, and applies
the brakes in the behavior of thoughtful and purposeful agents. Semantics or meaning, the what-it-is-we-believe (and want) is causally (and,
therefore, explanatorily) irrelevant to the production of behavior (which
is not to say that it cannot be used to predict behavior). I have merely
extended these arguments, applying them to information rather than
meaning or content. Since information, unlike meaning, requires truth,
I think these arguments are even more persuasive when applied to
information. I have, in fact, assumed up to this point that there is no
particular difficulty about how meaning, either as embodied in what a
person says or as embodied in what a person believes, could figure in a
causal explanation. But this, too, has its difficulties. Since I am convinced
that belief and meaning are notions that ultimately derive from the
information-carrying properties of living systems, I think these problems
are, at a deeper level, connected. I think, in fact, that the central problem
in this area is the causal efficacy of information. If we can find a
respectable job for information, if it can be provided a causal job to do,
if it can be put to work, then the causal role of meaning and belief
(indeed, of all the other psychological attitudes), being derivative, will
fall into place. But these are issues that go beyond the scope of this essay
and I will not return to them here.4

Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics, 33, nicely illustrates this with the property of being an Hparticle. A particle has the property of being an H-particle (at time t) if and only if a dime
Fodor flips (at time t) is heads. If the dime turns up tails, these particles are T-particles. Hparticles are obviously causally efficacious, but no one supposes that their causal efficacy is
to be explained by their being H-particles.
For a full discussion see Explaining Behaviour: Reasons in a World of Causes (Cambridge, MA:

1988 Bradford/MIT Press).

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To put information to work will require understanding how the

causal efficacy of a signal is altered by the fact that it carries information.
A part of the task, then, is to see how the causal efficacy of S (the signal
carrying the information that P) is changed or modified by the fact that,
in a certain range of circumstances, it occurs only when P is the case. I
say that this is part (not all) of the task since S's occurrence only when P
is the case does not mean that S carries the information that P. It depends
on what else, besides co-occurrence (by this I mean the occurrence of S
only when P is the case), is required for S to carry the information that
P. So showing the causal relevance of co-occurrence will not directly
demonstrate the causal relevance of information. Nonetheless, since we
are assuming, as a minimal condition on information, that S cannot carry
the information that P unless P is the case, unless, that is, S and P do cooccur in the relevent conditions, demonstrating the causal relevance of
co-occurrence will be an important step in showing that information
has a causal job to do.
This isn't as easy as it looks. The job, remember, is to show how the
co-occurrence of S with P, the fact that S occurs only when P is the
case, makes a difference in S's causal powers. The job is not to show
that S together with P causes things that S alone does not. That latter task
is simple enough but quite irrelevant. It is quite obvious that Tommy
and his big brother can do things that Tommy alone cannot. And if
Tommy never goes anywhere without his big brother, then Tommy
will be a "force" to contend with on the school playground. Strictly
speaking, though, the presence of his big brother doesn't enhance
Tommy s prowess. It merely makes him part of a team that is feared by
the other boys, a team whose presence is signaled by the appearance of
Tommy and, thus, makes (via the beliefs of the other boys) Tommy an
intimidating figure on the playground.
Such situations are familiar enough, but they are not what we are
after. What we are looking for, instead, is a case where Tommy's punches
carry increased authority because he (always) has his big brother with
him.5 How can Tommy derive added strength, increased causal powers,
from the mere fact (a fact that may even be unknown to Tommy) that
his big brother is always nearby? How can the (mere) fact that P is the
case when S occurs, whether or not anyone - including S - realizes this
Not, mind you, because he thinks, believes, or knows that his big brother is backing him up.
For this would, at best, only demonstrate, once again, the causal efficacy of belief.

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fact, change S's causal powers? Until we know how, we won't know
how information can make a difference in this world.
INDICATORS AND ARTIFACTS

I think we can make a beginning at understanding how this is possible

by thinking about how some elements are given a causal job to do
because of what they indicate about related conditions. Suppose we
want some particular kind of movement or change (call it M) to occur
when, and only when, condition P exists. I want an annoying buzzer to
go on when, and only when, passengers fail to buckle their seat belts. I
want the fan to go on when the engine overheats but not otherwise. I
want the light to come on when anyone, or anything, crosses a threshold. The way to get what I want is to make an indicator of P
something that will activate when, and only when, P is the case into
a cause of M. To design such mechanisms is a job for engineers. Find or
build something that is selectively sensitive to the occurrence of P and
make it into a switch for M. Find (or build) something that is sensitive
to passengers with unbuckled seat belts. Make it into a buzzer switch.
This device doesn't have to be very fancy just a little electricalmechanical gadget that will be activated by weight (on a car seat) and
electrical contact (in the seat belt buckle). Joint occurrence of the right
set of conditions (P) the condition in which we want M to occur is
then made into a switch for, a cause of, M, the buzzer. If things work
right, we now get M when, and only when, P: the buzzer sounds when,
and only when, there are passengers with unfastened seat belts.
Building a gadget like this (and such gadgets are all around us) is an
exercise in making a more or less reliable indicator, a structure exhibiting
a more or less reliable correlation with P, into a cause of M the
response to be coordinated with P. By appropriate design, manufacture,
and installation, the causal powers of an indicator, an informationbearing structure, an S that occurs only when P is the case, is modified,
and, what is most significant, it is modified because this indicator (or the
appropriate activation of this indicator) occurs when, and only when, a
certain other condition (P) occurs. The properties of this internal structure (S) that are relevant to its selection as a cause of M, and hence that
explain why it (now) causes M, are not its intrinsic properties its size,
shape, weight, color, charge, and so on. These might help to explain
how S is made to cause M, how it can be converted into a cause of M,

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but not why it is converted into a cause of M. It is, rather, S's relational
properties that explain why it was selected (by the engineer designing
the device) for this causal job. Anything, no matter what its intrinsic
properties (as long as they can be harnessed to do the job), would have
done as well. As long as the behavior of this element exhibits the
appropriate degree of correlation with P, it is a candidate for being made
into a switch for M, the behavior we want coordinated with P. If,
furthermore, an element is selected for its causal role (in the production
of M) because of its correlation with P, because it does not (normally)
occur without P, we have (almost) a case of an element's informational
properties explaining its causal properties: it does (or is made to do) this
because it carries information about (or co-occurs with) that. It isn't the
element's shape, form, or syntax that explains its conversion into a cause
of M; it is, instead, its information-carrying, its semantic, properties.
This is all a little too fast, of course. We smuggled into the proceedings an engineer, with purposes and intentions of his own, soldering
things here, wiring things there, because of what he knows (or thinks)
about the effects to be achieved thereby. I therefore expect to hear the
objection that deliberately designed artifacts do not demonstrate the
causal efficacy of information. All they illustrate, once again, is the causal
efficacy of belief (and purpose). In the case of artifacts, what explains the
conversion of an information-bearing element (an indicator of P) into a
cause of output (M) is the designer's knowledge (or belief) that it is a
reliable indicator and his or her desire to coordinate M with P. To make
information do some real work, it would be necessary to make the
causal powers of S depend on its carrying information, or on its cooccurrence with P, without the intercession of cognitive intermediaries
with purposes and intentions of their own. The information (correlation)
alone, not some agent's recognition of this fact, must carry the explanatory burden.
INDICATORS AND LEARNING
To see how this might be accomplished, simply remove the engineer.
Since artifacts do not spontaneously change the way they behave (at least
not normally in a desired way) without some help from the outside,
replace the seat belt mechanism with a system that is capable of such
unassisted reconfiguration. That is, replace the artifact with an animal
a rat, say. Put the rat into conditions a suitably arranged Skinner box
will do in which a certain response is rewarded (with food, say) when,

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and only when, it occurs in conditions P. The response is punished

when it occurs without P. Let P be some condition that the rat can
observe a certain audible tone, say. Let the response be the pressing of
a bar. What happens? Given a hungry rat, enough trials, and a tolerance
for stray errors, the rat learns to press the bar when, and only when, it
hears the tone. A correlation between M (bar pressing) and P (the tone)
begins to emerge. The engineer got the seat belt mechanism to behave
the way he wanted it to behave, to buzz when a passenger failed to
buckle her seat belt, by connecting wires in the right places, by making
an internal indicator of P (an unbuckled belt) into a cause of M (buzzer
activation). The same thing happens to the rat without the assistance of
an engineer or, indeed, any intentional agent. An internal indicator of P
(in this case a certain tone) becomes a cause of M (in this case barpressing movements) not through the intercession of an outside agent,
but merely by having the response, M, rewarded when it occurs in the
right condition (P).
This kind of learning discrimination learning can occur only if
there is some internal condition of the learner, call it S, that exhibits
some degree of correlation with P (the external condition being discriminated) - unless, that is, there is some internal condition of the learner
that under normal conditions carries information about the condition to
be discriminated. Unless there is some internal condition that occurs
when, and only when, P is the case, it will be impossible to get M, the
behavior, to occur when, and only when, P, the discriminated condition, exists. You can't make a system do M when (and only when) P
exists if there is nothing in the system to indicate when P exists, and
having something in the system to indicate when P exists is, among
other things, a matter of having something in the system that occurs
when, and only when, P exists. So when this type of learning is successful, as it often is, there must be, internal to the learner, a condition S
that, with some degree of reliability, occurs when (and only when) P
exists. There must actually be, inside the rat, something that (under
appropriate stimulus conditions) occurs when, and only when, the right
tone is sounded.
Furthermore, for this type of learning to occur, there must not only
be an internal structure, S, carrying information about P, it must, during
this type of learning, actually assume control functions it did not formerly have. It must be converted into a switch for M, the behavior that
(through this type of learning) becomes coordinated with P. Unless S is,
through this type of learning, recruited as a cause (or partial cause) of

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M, there is no way of coordinating behavior with the conditions on

which its success depends. For S is, by definition, the internal element
that signals when the conditions are right (when P exists) for the behavior
(M) to achieve success (to be rewarded). So S must be made into a cause
of M (at least something on which M depends) if learning is to occur.
Otherwise it is sheer magic. Whatever it is in the rat call it the rat's
perception of the tone that signals the occurrence of the tone, it must
actually be recruited as a cause of bar-pressing movements in this kind
of learning if the rat is to learn to press the bar when the tone occurs.
Not only must an internal indicator be enlisted for control duties in
this kind of learning, the properties of the indicator that explain its
recruitment (as a cause of movement) are its semantic or relational properties, the properties that do not supervene on its intrinsic neurophysiological character. What explains why the rat's perception of a tone causes
it to press the bar, what explains this internal element's altered causal
powers, is not the fact that it has certain neurophysiological properties a certain electrical-chemical-mechanical profile or form. For it presumably had that form before learning occurred (the rat could hear the tone
before it learned to respond to it in a particular way). Before learning
occurred, though, this internal state, this perception of the tone, did not
cause the same movements (or any movements at all). Hence, what
explains why the rat's perception of the tone causes movements it did
not formerly cause is the fact that it, the rat's perception of the tone, is,
specifically, a perception of the tone, the fact that it is an internal state
exhibiting the requisite correlation with those external conditions on
which the success of output depends. What explains the perceptual
state's newfound causal power is, in other words, its semantic, informational, or intentional properties not what it is, but what it is about.
If this theory, sketchy as it is, is even approximately right, then we
have found a place where information does some honest work: it does
real work when living systems are, during learning, reorganizing their
control circuits to exploit the correlations (correlations between what is
happening inside and what is happening outside) that perception puts at
their disposal. Whenever there is something inside a system that can, by
suitable redeployment, affect output, then there exists an opportunity to
put to work whatever information that element carries. Such information can be exploited if there is a range of behaviors whose benefits (to
the animal) depend on their emission in those (external) conditions
about which information is carried. If there is such a dependence, then,
assuming the animal capable of modifying its behavior so as to better

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coordinate it with those external conditions on which its success depends

(capable, that is, of learning), the animal can exploit perceptual information by recruiting, as a cause of behavior, the internal vehicles of this
information.
I say that this is an honest job for information because, unlike the
artifacts discussed earlier, it is information itself, the fact that S does not
normally occur unless P, and therefore (other possible conditions being
satisfied) the fact that S carries the information that P, that explains the
recruitment of internal elements as causes of movement (those movements whose success depends on their coordination with P). At the
neuroanatomical level it may be a mystery how such recruitment takes
place, how learning actually occurs, but that it does occur, in some
animals under some circumstances, is perfectly obvious. And it is its
occurrence, not details about how it occurs, that demonstrates indeed,
requires the causal efficacy of information.
There are, it seems to me, profound implications of this fact, the fact
that information begins to find a real causal and hence explanatory use
only in systems capable of learning. Only here do we find the behavior
of a system explicable in terms of the relational properties of the internal
states that produce it. Only here do we begin to see something like
content or meaning, properties (like information) that do not supervene
on the intrinsic properties of the internal states that possess it, assuming
a significant place in our explanations of animal and human behavior. It
is here, I submit, that psychological explanations of behavior first get a
real, as opposed to merely a metaphorical, purchase. It is only when
information begins to do some real explanatory hence, scientific
work that minds rightfully enter the metaphysical picture.
REFERENCES
Dretske, Fred (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
(1988). Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press
Fodor, Jerry (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press
Grice, Paul (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review 66:377-378

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12
If You Can't Make One, You
Don't Know How It Works

There are things I believe that I cannot say at least not in such a way
that they come out true. The title of this essay is a case in point. I really
do believe that, in the relevant sense of all the relevant words, if you
can't make one, you don't know how it works. The trouble is I do not
know how to specify the relevant sense of all the relevant words.
I know, for instance, that you can understand how something works
and, for a variety of reasons, still not be able to build one. The raw
materials are not available. You cannot afford them. You are too clumsy
or not strong enough. The police will not let you.
I also know that you may be able to make one and still not know
how it works. You do not know how the parts work. I can solder a
snaggle to a radzak, and this is all it takes to make a gizmo, but if I do
not know what snaggles and radzaks are, or how they work, making
one is not going to tell me much about what a gizmo is. My son once
assembled a television set from a kit by carefully following the instruction manual. Understanding next to nothing about electricity, though,
assembling one gave him no idea of how television worked.
I am not, however, suggesting that being able to build one is sufficient for knowing how it works. Only necessary. And I do not much
care about whether you can actually put one together. It is enough if
Reprinted from Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1994), 468482, by permission of the
publisher.
I read an early version of this essay at the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy
and Psychology, Montreal, 1992. I used an enlarged form of it at the NEH Summer
Institute on the Nature of Meaning, codirected by Jerry Fodor and Ernie LePore, at
Rutgers University in the summer of 1993. There were many people at these meetings
who gave me useful feedback and helpful suggestions. I am grateful to them.

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you know how one is put together. But, as I said, I do not know how to
make all the right qualifications. So I will not try. All I mean to suggest
by my provocative title is something about the spirit of philosophical
naturalism. It is motivated by a constructivist's model of understanding.
It embodies something like an engineer's ideal, a designer's vision, of
what it takes to really know how something works. You need a blueprint, a recipe, an instruction manual, a program. This goes for the mind
as well as any other contraption. If you want to know what intelligence
is, or what it takes to have a thought, you need a recipe for creating
intelligence or assembling a thought (or a thinker of thoughts) out of
parts you already understand.
INFORMATION AND INTENTIONALITY
In speaking of parts one already understands, I mean, of course, parts that
do not already possess the capacity or feature one follows the recipe to
create. One cannot have a recipe for cake that lists a cake, not even a
small cake, as an ingredient. One can, I suppose, make a big cake out of
small cakes, but recipes of this sort will not help one understand what a
cake is (although it might help one understand what a big cake is). As a
boy, I once tried to make fudge by melting fudge in a frying pan. All I
succeeded in doing was ruining the pan. Don't ask me what I was trying
to do change the shape of the candy, I suppose. There are perfectly
respectable recipes for cookies that list candy (e.g., gumdrops) as an
ingredient, but one cannot have a recipe for candy that lists candy as an
ingredient. At least it will not be a recipe that tells you how to make
candy or helps you understand what candy is. The same is true of minds.
That is why a recipe for thought cannot have interpretive attitudes or
explanatory stances among the eligible ingredients - not even the attitudes and stances of others. That is like making candy out of candy in
this case, one person's candy out of another person's candy. You can do
it, but you still will not know how to make candy or what candy is.
In comparing a mind to candy and television sets I do not mean to
suggest that minds are the sort of thing that can be assembled in your
basement or in the kitchen. There are things, including things one fully
understands, things one knows how to make, that cannot be assembled
that way. Try making Rembrandts or $100 bills in your basement. What
you produce may look genuine, it may pass as authentic, but it will not
be the real thing. You have to be the right person, occupy the right
office, or possess the appropriate legal authority in order to make certain

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things. There are recipes for making money and Rembrandts, and
knowing these recipes is part of understanding what money and Rembrandts are, but these are not recipes you and I can use. Some recipes
require a special cook.
This is one (but only one) of the reasons it is wrong to say, as I did
in the title, that if you cannot make one, you do not know how it
works. It would be better to say, as I did earlier, that if you do not
know how to make one, or know how one is made, you do not really
understand how it works.
Some objects are constituted, in part, by their relationships to other
objects. Rembrandts and $100 bills are like that. So are cousins and
mothers-in-law. That is why you could not have built my cousin in
your basement, while my aunt and uncle could. There is a recipe in this
case, just not one you can use. The mind, I think, is also like that, and I
will return to this important point in a moment.
It is customary to think of naturalistic recipes for the mind as starting
with extensional ingredients and, through some magical blending process, producing an intentional product: a thought, an experience, or a
purpose. The idea behind this proscription of intentional ingredients
seems to be that since what we are trying to build a thought is an
intentional product, our recipe cannot use intentional ingredients.
This, it seems to me, is a mistake, a mistake that has led some
philosophers to despair of ever finding a naturalistic recipe for the mind.
It has given naturalism an undeserved bad name. The mistake is the
same as if we proscribed using, say, copper wire in our instruction
manual for building amplifiers because copper wire conducts electricity
exactly what the amplifiers we are trying to build do. This, though, is
silly. It is perfectly acceptable to use copper wire in one's recipe for
building amplifiers. Amplifier recipes are supposed to help you understand how something amplifies electricity, not how something conducts
electricity. So you get to use conductors of electricity, and in particular
copper wire, as a part in one's amplifier kit. Conductors are eligible
components in recipes for building amplifiers even if one does not know
how they manage to conduct. An eligible part, once again, is an ingredient, a part, a component, that does not already have the capacity or
power one uses the recipe to create. That is why one can know what
gumdrop cookies are, know how to make them, without knowing how
to make gumdrops or what, exactly, gumdrops are.
The same is true for mental recipes. As long as there is no mystery
not, at least, the same mystery about how the parts work as how the

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whole is supposed to work, it is perfectly acceptable to use intentional

ingredients in a recipe for thought, purpose, and intelligence. What we
are trying to understand, after all, is not intentionality, per se, but the
mind. Thought may be intentional, but that is not the property we are
seeking a recipe to understand. As long as the intentionality we use is
not itself mental, then we are as free to use intentionality in our recipe
for making a mind as we are in using electrical conductors in building
amplifiers and gumdrops in making cookies.
Consider a simple artifact a compass. If it was manufactured properly (do not buy a cheap one), and if it is used in the correct circumstances (the good ones come with directions), it will tell you the direction of the Arctic Pole (I here ignore differences between magnetic and
geographic poles). That is what the pointer indicates. But although the
pointer indicates the direction of the Arctic Pole, it does not indicate
the whereabouts of polar bears even though polar bears live in the
Arctic. If you happen to know this fact about polar bears, that they live
in the Arctic (not the Antarctic), you could, of course, figure out where
the polar bears are by using a compass. But this fact about what you
could figure out if you knew does not mean that the compass pointer is
sensitive to the location of polar bears thus indicating their whereabouts
in the way it indicates the location of the Arctic. The pointer on this
instrument does not track the bears; it tracks the pole. If there is any
doubt about this, try using Mill's Methods: move the bears around while
keeping the pole fixed. The pointer on your compass will not so much
as quiver.
Talking about what a compass indicates is a way of talking about what
it tracks, what information it carries, what its pointer movements are dependent on, and a compass, just like any other measuring instrument,
can track one condition without tracking another even though these
conditions co-occur. Talk about what instruments and gauges indicate
or measure creates the same kind of intensional (with an "s") context as
does talk about what a person knows or believes. Knowing or believing
that that is the North Pole is not the same as knowing or believing that
that is the habitat of polar bears even though the North Pole is the habitat of polar bears. If we regard intensional (with an "s") discourse, referentially opaque contexts, as our guide to intentional (with a "t") phenomena, then we have, in a cheap compass, something we can buy at
the local hardware store, intentionality. Describing what such an instrument indicates is describing it in intensional terms. What one is describing is, therefore, in this sense, an intentional state of the instrument.

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It is worth emphasizing that this is not derived or in any way secondclass intentionality. This is the genuine article original intentionality, as
some philosophers (including this one) like to say. The intentional states
a compass occupies do not depend on our explanatory purposes, attitudes, or stances. To say that the compass (in certain conditions Q
indicates the direction of the Arctic Pole is to say that, in these conditions, the direction of the pointer depends in some lawlike way on the
whereabouts of the pole. This dependency exists whether or not we
know it exists, whether or not anyone ever exploits this fact to build
and use compasses. The intentionality of the device is not, like the
intentionality of words and maps, borrowed or derived from the intentionality (purposes, attitudes, knowledge) of its users. The power of this
instrument to indicate north to or for us may depends on our taking it to
be a reliable indicator (and, thus, on what we believe or know about it),
but its being a reliable indicator does not itself depend on us.
"Intentionality" is a much abused word, and it means a variety of
different things. But one thing it has been used to pick out are states,
conditions, and activities having a propositional content the verbal expression of which does not allow the substitution, salva veritate, of coreferring expressions. This is Chisholm's third mark of intentionality.1
Anything exhibiting this mark is about something else under an aspect.
It has, in this sense, an aspectual shape.2 Compass needles are about
geographical regions or directions under one aspect (as, say, the direction
of the pole) and not others (as, say, the habitat of polar bears). This is
the same way our thoughts are about a place under one aspect (as where
I was born) but not another (as where you were born). If having this
kind of profile is, indeed, one thing that is meant by speaking of a state,
condition, or activity as intentional, then it seems clear that there is no
need to naturalize intentionality. It is already a familiar part of our
physical world. It exists wherever you find clouds, smoke, tree rings,
shadows, tracks, light, sound, pressure, and countless other natural phenomena that carry information about how other parts of the world are
arranged and constituted.
Intentional systems, then, are not the problem. They can be picked
1 Roderick M. Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca, N.Y., 1957), chap. 11.
2 This is John Searle's way of putting it; see his The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.,
1992), 131, 156. I think Searle is wrong when he says (p. 161) that there are no aspectual
shapes at the level of neurons. Indicators in the brain, those in the sensory pathways, are as
much about the perceived world under an aspect as is the compass about the Arctic under
an aspect.

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up for a few dollars at your local hardware store. We can, therefore,

include them on our list of ingredients in our recipe for building a mind
without fear that we are merely changing the shape of the candy or the
size of the cake. What we are trying to build when we speak of a recipe
for building a mind is not merely a system that exhibits intentionality.
We already have that in systems and their information-carrying states
that are in no way mental. Rather, what we are trying to build is a
system that exhibits that peculiar array of properties that characterizes
thought. We are, among other things, trying to build something that
exhibits what Chisholm describes as the first mark of intentionality, the
power to say that something is so when it is not so, the power to
misrepresent how things stand in the world. Unlike informationproviding powers, the capacity to misrepresent is not to be found on the
shelves of hardware stores. For that we need a recipe.
MISREPRESENTATION
Let us be clear about what we seek a recipe to create. If we are trying
to build a thought, we are looking for something that cannot only say
that x is F without saying that x is G despite the coextensionality of "F*
and "G" 3 ; thus being about x under an aspect, we are looking for
something that can say this, as a thought can say it, even when x is not
F. Unless we have a recipe for this, we have no naturalistic understanding of what it is that we think, no theory of meaning or content.
Meaning or content, the what-it-is that we think, is, like intelligence
and rationality, independent of truth. So a recipe for thought, where
this is understood to include what one thinks, is, of necessity, a recipe
for building systems that can misrepresent the world they are about.
3

Despite even the necessary coextensionality of "F* and "G." A thought that x is F is
different from a thought that x is G even if F-ness and G-ness are related in such a way
that nothing can be F without being G. This, too, is an aspect of intentionality. In Knowledge
and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 173, I called this the second (for
nomic necessity) and third (for logical necessity) orders of intentionality. Although measuring instruments exhibit first-order intentionality (they can indicate that x is F without
indicating that x is G even when *'K' and "G" happen to be coextensional), they do not
exhibit higher levels of intentionality. If (in virtue of a natural law between F-ness and Gness) Fs must be G, then anything carrying information that x is F will thereby carry the
information that it is G. Unlike thoughts, compasses cannot distinguish between nomically
equivalent properties.
My discussion has so far passed over this important dimension of intentionality. Although I will return to it briefly, the point raises too many complications to be addressed
here.

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Without the capacity to misrepresent, we have no capacity for the kind

of representation that is the stuff of intelligence and reason.
Jerry Fodor focused attention on what he calls the disjunction problem for naturalistic theories of representation.4 The problem is one of
explaining how, in broadly causal terms, a structure in the head, call it
R, could represent, say, or mean that something was F even though (if
misrepresentation is to be possible) non-F-ish things are capable of
causing it. How, in roughly causal terms, can R mean that something is
F (the way a thought can be the thought that something is F) when
something's being Fis (at best5) only one of the things capable of causing
R? For someone trying to formulate an information-based recipe for
thought, this is, indeed, a vexing problem. But I mention the problem
here only to point out that this problem is merely another way of
describing the problem (for naturalistic theories) of misrepresentation.
For if one could concoct a recipe for building systems capable of misrepresentation capable, that is, of saying of something that was not F that
it was F then one would have a recipe for meaning, for constructing
structures having a content that was independent of causes in the desired
sense. This is so because if R can misrepresent something as being F,
then R is, of necessity, something whose meaning is independent of its
causes, something that can mean c o w even when it is caused by a
distant buffalo or a horse on a dark night. It is, therefore, something
whose meaning is less than the disjunction of situations capable of
causing it. In the words of Antony and Levine, it is something whose
meaning has been "detached" from its causes.6 A naturalistic recipe for
misrepresentation, therefore, is a recipe for solving the disjunction problem.7 One way of solving problems is to show that two problems are
really, at bottom, the same problem. We are making progress.
For this problem artifacts are of no help. Although clocks, compasses,
thermometers, and fire alarms all readily available at the corner hardware store can misrepresent the conditions they are designed to deliver
Jerry Fodor, A Theory of Content and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1990) and, earlier,
Psychosemantics (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
"At best" because, with certain Fs ("unicorn," "miracle," "angel," etc.) something's being
F will not even be among the things that cause R.
Louise Antony and Joseph Levine, "The Nomic and the Robust," in Meaning in Mind:
Fodor and His Critics (Oxford, 1991), 1-16.
Fodor puts it a bit differently, but the point, I think, is the same: "Solving the disjunction
problem and making clear how a symbol's meaning could be so insensitive to variability in
the causes of its tokenings are really two ways of describing the same undertaking" (A
Theory of Content and Other Essays, 91).

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information about, they need our help to do it. Their representational

successes and failures are underwritten by and, therefore, depend on
our purposes and attitudes, the purposes and attitudes of their designers
and users. As representational devices, as devices exhibiting a causally
detached meaning, such instruments are not therefore eligible ingredients in a recipe for making thought.
The reason the representational powers of instruments are not, like
their indicative (information-carrying) powers, an available ingredient in
mental recipes is, I think, obvious enough. I will, however, take a
moment to expand on the point in order to set the stage for what
follows.
Consider the thermometer. Since the volume of a metal varies lawfully with the temperature, both the mercury in the glass tube and the
paper clips in my desk drawer carry information about the local temperature. Both are intentional systems in that minimal, that first, sense
already discussed. Their behavior depends on a certain aspect of their
environment (on the temperature, not the color or size, of their neighbors) in the same way the orientation of a compass needle depends on
one aspect of its environment, not another. The only difference between
thermometers and paper clips is that we have given the one volume of
metal, the mercury in the glass tube, the job, the function, of telling us
about temperature. The paper clips have been given a different job.
Since it is the thermometer's job to provide information about temperature, it (we say) misrepresents the temperature when it fails to do its
assigned job, just as (we say) a book or a map might misrepresent the
matters of which they (purport to) inform us about. What such artifacts
say or mean is what we have given them the job of indicating or
informing us about, and since they do not lose their job at least not
immediately - merely by failing to satisfactorily perform their job, these
instruments continue to mean that a certain condition exists even when
that condition fails to exist, even when some other condition (a condition other than the one they have the job of informing about) is responsible for their behavior. For such measuring instruments, meanings are
causally detached from causes for the same reason that functions are
causally detached from (actual) performance. This is why thermometers
can, while paper clips cannot, misrepresent the temperature. When
things go wrong, when nothing is really 98, a paper clip fails to say,
while the broken thermometer goes right on saying, that it is 98.
But, as I said, thermometers cannot do this by themselves. They need
our help. We are the source of the job, the function, without which the

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thermometer could not say something that was false. Take us away and
all you have is a tube full of mercury being caused to expand and
contract by changes in the temperature a column of metal doing
exactly what paper clips, thumb tacks, and flag poles do. Once we
change our attitude, once we (as it were) stop investing informational
trust in the instrument, it loses its capacity to misrepresent. Its meaning
ceases to be detached. It becomes, like every other piece of metal, a
mere purveyor of information.

NATURAL FUNCTIONS

Although representational artifacts are thus not available as eligible ingredients in our recipe for the mind, their derived (from us) power to
misrepresent is suggestive. If an information-carrying element in a system
could somehow acquire the function of carrying information, and acquire this function in a way that did not depend on our intentions,
purposes, and attitudes, then it would thereby acquire (just as a thermometer or a compass acquires) the power to misrepresent the conditions it had the function of informing about. Such functions would
bring about a detachment of meaning from cause. Furthermore, since
the functions would not be derived from us, the meanings (unlike the
meaning of thermometers and compasses) would be original, underived
meanings. Instead of just being able to build an instrument that could,
because of the job we give it, fool us, the thing we build with these
functions could, quite literally, itself be fooled.
If, then, we could find naturalistically acceptable functions, we could
combine these with natural indicators (the sort used in the manufacture of compasses, thermometers, pressure gauges, and electric eyes) in
a naturalistic recipe for thought. If the word "thought" sounds too
exalted for the mechanical contraption I am assembling, we can describe the results in more modest terms. What we would have is a
naturalistic recipe for representation, a way of building something that
would have, quite apart from its creator's (or anyone else's) purposes
or thoughts, a propositional content that could be either true or false.
If that is not quite a recipe for mental bearnaise sauce, it is at least a
recipe for a passable gravy. I will come back to the bearnaise sauce in
a moment.
What we need in the way of another ingredient, then, is some natural
process whereby elements can acquire, on their own, apart from us, an

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information-carrying function. Where are these natural processes, these

candyless functions, that will let us make our mental confections?8
As I see it, there are two retail suppliers for the required natural
functions: one phylogenetic, the other ontogenetic.
If the heart and kidneys have a natural function, something they are
supposed to be doing independently of our knowledge or understanding
of what it is, then it presumably comes from their evolutionary, their
selectional, history. If the heart has the function of pumping blood, if
(following Larry Wright9) that is why the heart is there, then, by parity
of reasoning, and depending on actual selectional history, the senses
would have an information-providing function, the job of "telling" the
animal in which they occur what it needs to know about the world in
which it lives. If this were so, the natural function of sensory systems
would be to provide information about an organism's optical, acoustic,
and chemical surroundings. There would thus exist, inside the animal,
representations of its environment, elements capable of saying what is
false. Although I have put it crudely, this, I take it, is the sort of thinking
that inspires biologically oriented approaches to mental representation.10
There is, however, a second, an ontogenetic, source of natural functions. Think of a system with certain needs, certain things it must have
in order to survive.11 In order to satisfy those needs it has to do A in

9
10

11

For the purpose of this essay, I ignore skeptics about functions - those who think, for
example, that the heart only has the function of pumping blood because this is an effect
in which we have (for whatever reason) a special interest. See, for example, John Searle,
The Rediscovery of Mind, p. 238, and Dan Dennett's "Evolution, Error and Intentionality"
in The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
Larry Wright, "Functions," Philosophical Review 82 (1973): 139-168, and Teleological Explanations (Berkeley, 1976).
E.g., R u t h Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for
Realism (Cambridge, Mass., 1984) and "Biosemantics," Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 6
(1989); David Papineau, Reality and Representation (New York, 1987) and "Representation
and Explanation," Philosophy of Science 51, no. 4 (1984): 550-572; Mohan Matthen.
"Biological Functions and Perceptual Content," Journal of Philosophy 85, no. 1 (1988): 5
27; and Peter Godfrey Smith, "Misinformation," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19. no. 4
(December 1989): 533-550 and "Signal, Decision, Action," Journal of Philosophy 88, no.
12 (December 1991): 709-722.
This may sound as though we are smuggling in the back door what we are not allowing
in the front: a tainted ingredient, the idea of a needful system, a system, that, given its
needs, has a use for information. I think not. All that is here meant by a need (for system
of type S) is some condition or result without which the system could (or would) not
exist as a system of type S. Needs, in this minimal sense, are merely necessary conditions
for existence. Even plants have needs in this sense. Plants cannot exist (as plants) without
water and sunlight.

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conditions C. Nature has not equipped it with an automatic yl-response

to conditions C. There is, in other words, no hard-wired, heritable
instinct to A in circumstances C. Think of C as a mushroom that has
recently appeared in the animal's natural habitat. Although attractive (to
this kind of animal), the mushroom is, in fact, poisonous. The animal
can see the mushrooms. It has the perceptual resources for picking up
information about (i.e., registering) the presence of C (it looks distinctive), but it does not yet have an appropriate A response (in this particular case, A = avoidance) to C.
We could wait for natural selection, and a little bit of luck, to solve
this problem for the species, for the descendants of this animal, but if
the problem - basically a coordination problem is to be solved at the
individual level, by this animal, learning must occur. If this animal is to
survive, what must happen is that the internal sign or indicator of C
something inside this animal that constitutes its perception of C - must
be made into a cause of A (avoidance). Control circuits must be reconfigured by inserting the internal indicators of C (the internal sensory
effects of Q into the behavioral chain of command. Short of a miracle
the fortuitous occurrence of A whenever C is encountered - this is the
only way the coordination problem essential for survival can be solved.
Internal indicators must be harnessed to effector mechanisms so as to
coordinate output A to the conditions, C, they carry information about.
Learning of this kind achieves the same result as do longer-term evolutionary solutions: internal elements that supply needed information acquire the function of supplying it by being drafted (in this case, through
a learning process) into the control loop because they supply it. A
supplier of information acquires the function of supplying information
by being recruited for control duties because it supplies it.12
Obviously this ingredient, this source of natural functions, whether it
be phylogenetic or ontogenetic, cannot be ordered from a Sears catalog.
There is nothing that comes in a bottle that we can squirt on thermally
sensitive tissue that will give this tissue the natural function of indicating
temperature, nothing we can rub on a photosensitive pigment that will
give it the job of detecting light. If something is going to get the
function, the job, the purpose, of carrying information in this natural
way, it has to get it on its own. We cannot "assign" these functions,
although we can (by artificial selection or appropriate training) encour12 This is a short and fast version of the story I tell in Explaining Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.,
1988).

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age their development. If the only natural functions are those provided
by evolutionary history and individual learning, then, no one is going to
build thinkers of thoughts, much less a mind, in the laboratory. This
would be like building a heart, a real one, in your basement. If hearts
are essentially organs of the body having the biological function of
pumping blood, you cannot build them. You can wait for them to
develop, maybe even hurry things along a bit by timely assists, but you
cannot assemble them out of ready-made parts. These functions are the
result of the right kind of history, and you cannot not now give a
thing the right kind of history. It has to have it. Although there is a
recipe for building internal representations, structures having natural
indicator functions, it is not a recipe you or I, or anyone else, can use to
build one.
THE DISJUNCTION PROBLEM

There are, I know, doubts about whether a recipe consisting of information and natural teleology (derived from natural functions - either
phylogenetic or ontogenetic) is capable of yielding a mental product
something with an original power to misrepresent. The doubts exist
even with those who share the naturalistic impulse. Jerry Fodor, for
instance, does not think Darwin (or Skinner, for that matter) can rescue
Brentano's chestnuts from the fire.13 He does not think teleological
theories of intentionality will solve the disjunction problem. Given the
equivalence of the disjunction problem and the problem of misrepresentation, this is a denial, not just a doubt, that evolutionary or learningtheoretic accounts of functions are up to the task of detaching meaning
from cause, of making something say c o w when it can be caused by
horses on a dark night.
I tend to agree with Fodor about the irrelevance of Darwin for
understanding mental representation. I agree, however, not (like Fodor)
out of the general skepticism about teleological accounts of meaning,
but because I think Darwin is the wrong place to look for the teleology, for the functions, underlying mental representations (beliefs,
thoughts, judgments, preferences, and their ilk). Mental representations
have their place in explaining deliberate pieces of behavior, intentional
acts for which the agent has reasons. This is exactly the sort of behavior
that evolutionary histories are unequipped to explain. We might rea13

Fodor, A Theory of Content and Other Essays, 70.

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sonably expect Darwin to tell us why people blink, reflexively when

someone pokes a finger at their eye, but not why they deliberately
wink at a friend, the kind of behavior we invoke beliefs and desires
(mental representations) to explain. I do not doubt that the processes
responsible for blink (and a great many other) reflexes are controlled
by elements having an information-providing function (derived from
natural selection). After all, if the reflex is to achieve its (presumed)
purpose, that of protecting the eye, there must be something in there
with the job of telling (informing) the muscles controlling the eyelids
that there is an object approaching. But the representations derived
from these phylogenetic functions are not mental representations. We
do not blink because we believe a finger is being jabbed at our eye.
And even if we do believe it, we blink, reflexively, before we believe it
and independent of believing it. So even if there are representations
whose underlying functions are phylogenetic, these are not the representations we would expect to identify with mental representations, the
representations that serve to explain intentional behavior. For that, I
submit, one needs to look to the representations whose underlying
functions are ontogenetic.
Nonetheless, wherever we get the teleology, Fodor thinks it is powerless to solve the disjunction problem and, hence, hopeless as an account of thought content. I disagree. There are, to be sure, some
problems for which teleology is of no help. But there are, or so I believe,
some aspects of the naturalization project for which functions are indispensable. Whether teleology helps specifically with the disjunction problem depends on what one identifies as the disjunction problem. Since I
have heard various things singled out as the disjunction problem, I offer
the following two problems. Both have some claim to be called the
disjunction problem. I will indicate, briefly, the kind of solution I favor
to each. Teleology helps with only one.14
1. If a token of type R indicates (carries the information that) A, it
also indicates that A or B (for any B). If it carries the information that x
is a jersey cow, for instance, it carries the information that x is either a
jersey cow or a holstein cow (or a can opener, for that matter). It also
carries the information that x is, simply, a cow - a jersey cow, a holstein
cow, and so on. This being so, how does an information-based approach
to meaning get a token of type JR to mean that A rather than A or B?
14 I was helped in my thinking about these problems by Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Misinformation."

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How can an event have the content JERSEY C O W rather than, say, c o w
when any event that carries the first piece of information also carries the
second? To this problem functions provide an elegant answer. A token
of type R can carry information that it does not have the function of
carrying that it does not, therefore, mean (in the sense of "mean" in
which a thing can mean that P when P is false). Altimeters, for instance,
carry information about air pressure (that is how they tell the altitude),
but it is not their function to indicate air pressure. Their function is to
indicate altitude. That is why they represent (and can misrepresent)
altitude and not air pressure.
2. If tokens of type R can be caused by both A and B, how can
tokens of this type mean that A (and not A or 23)? If R is a type of
structure tokens of which can be caused by both cows and, say, horses
on a dark night, how can any particular token of R mean c o w rather
than COW OR HORSE ON A DARK NIGHT? For this problem I think
Fodor is right: teleology is of no help. What we need, instead, is a better
understanding of information, how tokens of a type R can carry information (that x is a cow, for instance) even though, in different circumstances and on other occasions, tokens of this same type fail to carry this
information (because x is not a cow; it is a horse on a dark night). The
solution to this problem requires understanding the way information is
relativized to circumstances, the way tokens of type R that occur in
broad daylight at 10 feet, say, can carry information that tokens of this
same type, in other circumstances, in the dark or at 1200 feet, fail to
carry.15
The problem of detaching meaning from causes and thus solving
the problem of misrepresentation - occurs at two distinct levels, at the
level of types and the level of tokens. At the token level the problem is:
how can tokens of a type all have the same meaning or content, F,
when they have different causes (hence, carry different information)?
Answer: each token, whatever information it happens to carry, whatever
its particular cause, has the same information-carrying function, a function it derives from the type of which it is a token. Since meaning is
identified with information-carrying function, each token, whatever its
cause, has the same meaning, the job of indicating F. Teleology plays a
crucial role here - at the level of tokens. The problem at the type level
is: how can a type of event have, or acquire, the function of carrying
15 In Knowledge and the Flow of Information I called these circumstances, the ones to which
the informational content of a signal was relative, "channel conditions."

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information F when tokens of this type occur, or can occur (if misrepresentation is to be possible), without F? Answer: certain tokens, those
that occur in circumstances C, depend on F. They would not occur
unless F existed. These tokens carry the information that F. It is from
them that the type acquires its information-carrying function. At the
type level, then, teleology is of no help. Information carries the load.
Both are needed to detach meaning from causes.
There is a third problem, sometimes not clearly distinguished from
the preceding two problems, that has still a different solution (why
should different problems have the same solution?). How can R represent something as F without representing it as G when the properties F
and G are equivalent in some strong way (nomically, metaphysically, or
logically)? How, for instance, can R have the function (especially if this
is understood as a natural function) of indicating that something is water
without having the function of indicating that it is H 2 O? If it cannot,
then, since we can obviously believe that something is water and not
believe that it is H 2 O, a theory of representation that equates content
with what a structure has the natural function of indicating is too feeble
to qualify as a theory of belief. It does not cut the intentional pie into
thin enough slices.
I mention this problem here (I also alluded to it in footnote 3), not
for the purpose of suggesting an answer to it,16 but merely to set it apart
as requiring special treatment. The problem of distinguishing representational contents that are equivalent in some strong way is surely a
problem for naturalistic theories of content, but it is not a problem that
teleology (at least not a naturalistic teleology) can be expected to solve.
To discredit a teleological approach to representation because it fails to
solve this problem, then, is like criticizing it because it fails to solve
Zeno's Paradoxes.
THE RECIPE

We have, then, the following recipe for making a thoughtlike entity. It

does not give us a very fancy thought certainly nothing like the
thoughts we have every day: that tomorrow is my birthday, for example,
or that I left my umbrella in the car. But one thing at a time. The recipe
will do its job if it yields something - call it a "proto-thought" - that has
16

I tackled that in Knowledge and the Flow of Information, 215ff.

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belieflike features. I, personally, would be happy with a crude de re

belief about a perceived object that it was, say, moving.
Recipe: Take a system that has a need for the information that F, a
system whose survival or well-being depends on its doing A in conditions F. Add an element, or a detector system that produces elements,
that carries information about condition F. Now, stir in a natural process, one capable of conferring on the F-indicator the function of carrying
this piece of information. One does not quite "stir" these processes in
(the metaphor is getting a bit strained at this point). Once you have got
the right system, adding functions is more like waiting for the dough to
rise. There is nothing more one can do. You sit back and hope that
natural processes will take a favorable turn. Just as one cannot expect
everything in which one puts yeast to rise (it does not work in sand),
one cannot expect to get representational "bread" from everything in
which needed indicators are placed. You need a reasonably sophisticated
system, one with a capacity to reorganize control circuits so as to exploit
information in coordinating its behavior to the conditions it gets information about. You need a system, in other words, capable of the right
kind of learning. These are special systems, yes, but they are not systems
that must already possess representational powers. We are not, in requiring such systems in our recipe, smuggling in tainted ingredients.
If all goes well, when the process is complete, the result will be a
system with internal resources for representing and, equally important
from the point of view of modeling the mind, misrepresenting its
surroundings. Furthermore, that this system represents, as well as what it
represents, will be independent of what we know or believe about it.
For we, the cooks, are not essential parts of this process. The entire
process can happen "spontaneously" and, when it does, the system will
have its own cache of original intentionality.
RATIONALITY: THE FUNCTIONAL ROLE OF THOUGHT
Whether this is really enough to have supplied a recipe for thought
depends, of course, on just what one demands of thought. What does it
take to be a thought? If all it takes is possession of content, then, perhaps,
we have supplied a recipe of sorts for making a thought. But the product
is pretty disappointing, a mere shadow of what we know (in ourselves
and others) to be the fullest and richest expression of the mind. What I
have described might be realized in a snail. What we want (I expect to

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hear) is something more, something exhibiting the complex dynamics,

both inferential and explanatory, that our thoughts have. To have a cow
thought it is not enough to have an internal, isolated cow representation.
To be a cow thought, this representation must actually do what cow
thoughts do. It must be involved in reasoning and inference about cows.
It must, together with cow-directed desires, explain cow-directed behavior and rationalize cow-related attitudes and intentions.
There is validity to this complaint. If we are going to make a thought,
we want the product to both look and behave like a thought. What we
have so far devised may (to be generous) look a bit like a thought. At
least it has representational content of the sort we associate with thought.
Nonetheless, there is nothing to suggest that our product will behave
like a thought. Why, then, advertise the recipe as a recipe for thought?
I have, after all, already conceded that there may be representations of
this sort, mechanisms in the body having an indicator function, that are
not mental representations at all. When the underlying functions are
phylogenetic (e.g., in the processes controlling various reflexes), the
representations are not thoughts. They have a content, yes, but they do
not behave like thoughts. They do not, for instance, interact with desires
and other beliefs to produce intelligent and purposeful action. Why,
then, suppose that when the functions are ontogenetic, when they
develop in learning, the results are any better qualified to be classified as
mental?
Since I have addressed this issue elsewhere,17 I will merely sketch an
answer. A system that acquires, in accordance with the recipe, and in its
own lifetime, the power to represent the objects in its immediate environment will also, automatically, be an intelligent system, one capable
of behaving (at least insofar as these representations are concerned) in a
rational way. To see why this is so, consider a process by means of
which an indicator of F might acquire the function of carrying information about the F-ness of things - becoming, thereby, a representation
(possibly, on occasion, a misrepresentation) that something is F. In order
to acquire this status, the element must acquire the job of supplying
information about the F-ness of things. The only way an element can
acquire this job description, I submit, is by being recruited to perform
control-related services because it supplies this needed information. If R
is drafted to shape output because it supplies needed information about
17

Explaining Behavior, Chapters 4 and 5.

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when and where that output is appropriate, then, no matter what further
services may be required of R, part of JR.'S job, its function, is to supply
this needed information. That is why it is there, directing traffic, in the
way that it is.
In achieving its representational status, then, R becomes a determinant of need-related behavior, behavior that satisfies needs when R
carries the information it is its function to carry. Since R represents the
conditions (F) in which the behavior it is called upon to cause is needsatisfying, R must, when it is doing its job, produce intelligent (i.e.,
need-satisfying) output. Even when it is not doing its job, even when it
misrepresents, the behavior it helps produce will be behavior that is
rationalized by the F-facts that R (mis)represents as existing. According
to this recipe for thought, then, something becomes the thought that F
by assisting in the production of an intelligent response to F.
Something not only becomes the thought that F by assisting in the
production of an intelligent response to F, it assists in the intelligent
response because it signifies what it does. When the capacity for thought
emerges in accordance with the preceding recipe, not only do thoughts
(together with needs and desires) conspire to produce intelligent behavior, they produce this behavior because they are the thoughts they are,
because they have that particular content. It is their content, the fact
that they are thoughts that F, not thoughts that G, that explains why
they were recruited to help in the production of those particular
responses to F. This, it seems to me, vindicates, in one fell swoop,
both the explanatory and rationalizing role of content. We do not need
"rationality constraints" in our theory of content. Rationality emerges
as a by-product from the process in which representational states are
created.
Our recipe yields a product having the following properties:
1. The product has a propositional content that represents the world in an
aspectual way (as, say, F rather than G even when Fs are always G).
2. This content can be either true or false.
3. The product is a "player" in the determination of system output (thus
helping to explain system behavior).
4. The propositional content of this product is the property that explains the
product's role in determining system output. The system not only does what
it does because it has this product, but what it is about this product that
explains why the system does what it does is its propositional content.
5. Although the system can behave stupidly, the normal role of this product

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(the role it will play when it is doing the job for which it was created) will
be in the production of intelligent (need and desire satisfaction) behavior.
This, it seems to me, is about all one could ask of a naturalistic recipe
for thought.

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13
The Nature of Thought

A state or activity is extrinsic if an agent cannot occupy this state or

engage in this activity, unless there exists (or existed) some wholly
distinct object. Hitting a home run, watching a sunset, and paddling a
canoe are extrinsic activities. Being watched, surrounded, and ignored
are extrinsic states.
If, as some of these examples suggest, this other object must be a
person, a conscious being of some sort, I will say that the extrinsic state
or activity has a social character. A person can be surrounded by trees or
water, but you need another conscious being to be ignored or watched.
Marrying, divorcing, and tangoing are also social: it takes two. Killing,
kidnapping, and stealing, although not exactly sociable, are also social.
You simply cannot do these things alone, without there existing (either
then or at some earlier time) another conscious being. Being a father
and a widow are also social in this minimal sense. Fathers must have
children and widows must have had husbands.
If this is what it means to have a social character, and I do not see
how anything less could qualify, then it seems plausible nay, obvious
that language has a social character. Communication, the heart and soul
of language, requires senders and receivers. Without a set of reciprocal
intentions and agreements, without a network of shared conventions
Reprinted from Philosophical Studies 70 (1993), 185-199, by permission of the publisher.
Copyright 1993 by Kluwer Academic Publishers, with kind permission from Kluwer
Academic Publishers. This essay was written for a conference on The Social Character of
Language and Thought sponsored by the University of California, Riverside, May 1516,
1992. Tyler Burge and Pat Suppes also gave papers. I am grateful to them, to many people
in the audience, and especially to my commentator, Richard Fumerton, for stimulating
criticism and discussion.

227

that confer meaning on our acoustic productions, nothing we do counts

as saying anything.
I do not mean to suggest that we cannot talk to or communicate
with ourselves. Hermits can scribble reminders to themselves. And even
without a natural language (whose origin, if not the present use of,
might require other people) a person might cut notches in trees so that
she can later find her way out of the forest. Isn't she communicating
with herself saying, in effect, "Go this way!" to a later time slice of
herself? If this isn't language, it certainly looks like communication.
We could, I know, quarrel about this, but I'm not going to. That
language at least in origin, if not always in application or use (as in
the case of the hermit) - has a social character strikes me as plausible
enough to accept on its face without niggling over what, exactly, is to
be counted as a language and what, exactly, is meant by the "cannot"
in my definition of a social phenomenon. 1 Since everything we in fact
call a language, at least a natural language, is the product of social
factors, I am content to leave the matter there content, that is, to
acknowledge that language has a social character. You can talk to
yourself, or to a rock, but the capability of doing so presupposes the
existence if not at the present time, then at some past time - of
other conscious beings.
I am quick to concede this point because, frankly, I am more interested in thought, and the possibility of its having a social character, than
I am in language. For thought is not, at least not on the surface, a social
phenomenon. Quite the reverse. Language may be public maybe even
essentially public - but thought is surely private, maybe even essentially
so.2 My ability to say I am hungry may depend on the existence of
shared conventions that give meaning to the sounds I produce, but my
ability to think I am hungry does not seem to depend on anyone else.
Just as I could, all alone in the universe, be hungry, so I could, or so it
seems, also think I was hungry. Why not?
Well, a number of philosophers have told us, or tried to tell us, why
1

Tyler Burge (1990: 113) suggests that, if nothing else, language is social in that interaction
with other persons is psychologically necessary to learn language.
2 Those who argue for the social character of thought are not, of course, denying that
thought is private, something that goes on in the head of the thinker. I can make out my
Federal income tax return in the privacy of my home, but in order for this to be a correct
description of what is gong on in my home, there has to be something (a federal government) outside my home.

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not.3 I don't believe them. I go halfway but no further. Thought is

extrinsic, yes, but it is not social.4 Thinking that P, for any value of P,
requires the existence of objects wholly distinct from the thinker, yes,
but it does not require that any of these objects be another person. Even
if a solitary speaker is a contradiction, a solitary thinker is not.
Let me say a word about philosophical motivations before I go on to
say why I believe this, why I am convinced that the content of thought
- what we think although extrinsic to the thinker, is not essentially
social. I have in mind the sorts of considerations that dominate current
thinking about the causal efficacy, and hence the explanatory role, of
thought. These considerations have convinced many philosophers that
thought cannot even be extrinsic, let alone social. The reasoning goes
something like this: if we are to retain the familiar doctrine that much
of what we do is not only rationalized, but explained, by what we think,
then it seems that what it is we think has to be intrinsic to (or supervene
on states that are intrinsic to) the agent whose behavior it helps explain.5
For, as our definitions reveal, extrinsic (and therefore social) facts about
A depend on the existence and character of some other, wholly distinct,
object B. Remove B, change B, or simply imagine A the same in every
other respect (a twin A, if you will) related to a different B, and A no
longer occupies the same extrinsic state. Hilda is a widow. This is an
extrinsic condition of Hilda. It is also a condition that, because extrinsic,
does not explain anything about Hilda's impact on, her power to affect,
the rest of the world.6 The causal story from this point forward in time,
at least with regard to Hilda's contribution to it, would be exactly the
Donald Davidson (1975), for example. Also D. W. Hamlyn (1990). I do not include Tyler
Burge (1979, 1982) in this class, despite the prominence of his arguments against an
individualistic treatment of thought, because Burge does not claim that thought has a social
character (in the sense defined earlier), but that "many" (1990: 116) or "virtually" all
(1982: 117) thoughts have this character. He is careful to say (1979: 540) that he prefers to
"leave open precisely how far one can generalize" his argument for the social character of
thoughts. Burge should be understood not as arguing that thought cannot occur in the
absence of the social, but that thought can be affected by the social without affecting the
intrinsic physical state of the thinker.
Putnam's (1975) Twin Earth examples have convinced many that thought, at least thoughts
involving natural kinds, are extrinsic (whether or not they are, in addition, social).
This, basically, is the assumption that drives the currently orthodox idea that if thoughts
are relevant to explaining behavior, their content must be narrow (i.e., intrinsic to the
system whose behavior it helps explain). See Fodor (1980, 1987).
Other people, or Hilda herself, believing that Hilda is a widow, can make a difference, a
causal difference, of course, but this is quite a different mater.

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same if we imagined that, because of a legal technicality, she was not

married to the deceased and is, therefore, technically not a widow.
Extrinsic conditions are like that: you can change them, remove them,
or imagine them to be different in various respects without ever changing the causal powers of the object or person that is in this extrinsic
condition. This being so, how can extrinsic and, therefore, social facts
about A, depending as they do on factors that are temporally and spatially remote from A, help explain A's current behavior? Surely what
explains, causally explains, A's raising her arm or pushing a button (and,
therefore, the "richer" behaviors these basic acts help constitute: e.g.,
voting for a candidate or blowing up a bridge) are intrinsic, not extrinsic,
facts about A.
According to this line of reasoning, then, if what we think is causally
relevant to what we do, then what we think, and hence the thoughts
themselves, have to be intrinsic states of the thinker. If thoughts are to
fulfill their familiar role as both rationalizers and explainers of behavior,
they cannot have a social character. If they do, then, like Hilda's widowhood, they are irrelevant to understanding what goes on in the world.
They are, in particular, irrelevant to understanding why the thinker
behaves the way she does.
Since I have already indicated my sympathy for the view that thought
has an extrinsic character, this argument cuts as deeply against my own
position as it does against those who believe that thought has a social
character. I will return, later, to indicate why I am not deterred by this
fact. I mention the argument now, however, to suggest some of what is
at stake in this controversy. It is not simply a matter of thought having,
or lacking, a social character. Matters do not end there. For if thought
has a social character, if what one thinks somehow depends on the
existence of other human beings in the world, then it becomes a mystery
how what one thinks can explain what one does. I do not like mysteries.
I also believe that, sometimes at least, what I do is explained by what I
think. That is my motive for resisting the socialization of thought.7
In rejecting the social (although not the extrinsic) character of
thought, I do not, of course, reject the idea that many, perhaps most,
conceivably even all, thoughts can be expressed or described in such a
way as to imply the existence of other conscious agents. All I reject is
7

As remarked earlier, it is also a good reason to resist the externalization of thought. I will
try to indicate later why I do not believe it is as good a reason.

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the view that they have to be expressed that way to capture the psychological reality of the thought being described.
To illustrate this important point, suppose I describe Clyde as thinking that my wife is a good cook. What I say (not just my saying it)
implies that I have a wife. Clyde cannot think this thought unless I have
a wife, unless, therefore, there is someone else in the world besides
Clyde. He can, of course, think some other thought, a thought he might
express by the words "Your wife is a good cook," but if I do not have
a wife, this would not be the thought that my wife is a good cook. It
would be the thought that X is a good cook where "X" picks out
someone, or something, that Clyde mistakenly takes to be my wife and
thinks, mistakenly or not, is a good cook. This something needn't be a
human being; it could be a robot or a figment of Clyde's imagination.
So Clyde can have a thought that he would express this way without
my having a wife, but he cannot have a thought fitting this description,
the thought that my wife is a good cook, without my having a wife.
What this tells us is that we can describe what someone thinks in a
way that implies the existence of other people even though the thought
being described remains, so to speak, socially uncommitted. Our attributions of thought have, or may have, a social character while the
thoughts themselves lack it.8
So what must be shown if one is to show that thought has a social
character is not merely that our attributions of thought, our thought
ascriptions, have a social character, but that the thoughts themselves are
such that they cannot be thought, cannot possess the kind of psychological identity that makes them the thoughts they are, without the existence of other beings. It may turn out, as Brian Loar (1985) argues, that
the that-clauses we use to ascribe thoughts are shot through with social
presuppositions but that the thoughts themselves, the content that we
8

In 1979 (76) and 1982 (98) Burge is careful to point out that the individuation of thoughts
is bound up primarily with the obliquely occurring expressions in the content-clauses (the
that-clauses) we attribute to a person. Other differences (mainly involving personal pronouns, possessive adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and indexical adverbs and pronouns
like "here," "now," "there," etc.), although they make for differences in ascription, do not
constitute differences in psychological content.
Woodfield (1982a: vi) makes the same distinction and says that in considering the social
(or extrinsic) character of thought we are concerned with whether these thoughts are
intrinsically social - whether, that is, it is the thought itself that is existentially committed or
merely our ascriptions of thought. What we are after (Woodfield 1982b: 263) is "the whole
content and nothing but the content as it presented itself to 5."

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ordinarily use to individuate thoughts, and on which we rely to understand the behavior of the person in whom they occur, is free of such
social implications.
Since this is a moderately tricky point, let me dwell on it a moment
longer. It would be silly to say that action has a social character, that you
cannot do anything in isolation, because we can describe every action in
a way that implies the existence of other human beings. Clyde touched
my car. That is one way of describing what Clyde did, and describing
what he did in this way implies that someone else (me) exists. Maybe I
can always manage to describe what Clyde and everyone else does by
words that imply that I (or some other human being) exists. Susan
stepped on a rock that I once stepped on. Andrew bought a jacket the
same color as mine. And so on. The possibility of doing this proves
nothing. It shows nothing about action itself (as opposed to these actions) because there are other descriptions that are equally correct descriptions of actions Clyde performed that do not imply that there are
other human beings. Clyde not only touched my car, he touched a car.
That, too, is an action of his, and it does not imply that anyone else
exists. So action does not have a social character. If you want to show
that action has a social character, you have to show not that actions can
be described in a way so as to imply the existence of other human
beings, but that they have to be, that unless this implication is present the
thing being described is not really an action. This is what it takes to
show that thought has a social character. Not that thoughts can be,
perhaps always are, described in such a way as to imply the existence of
other beings, but that unless this implication is present, what is being
described is not really a thought.
This is a very tall order. I do not know how anyone can hope to
argue it without a fully developed theory of what it takes to have a
thought.
There are, I know, shortcuts. You don't need a complete theory of
the mind. To establish the social character of thought, all you need is a
necessary condition for thought that itself has a social character. Ever
since Descartes, one of the favorite candidates for this necessary condition has been language. You can't think anything if you don't have a
language since thought is, as it were, an internalization of the spoken
word (or, as with behaviorists, a linguistic disposition). If, then, language
is social, something I have already conceded, then so is thought. You
cannot develop the capacity to think, hence cannot think, unless there
are (or were they may all have died) other people. You can have a

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solitary thinker of thoughts, but only if he or she acquired this capacity

in a social framework.9
I think it fairly obvious that some thoughts depend intimately on
language. I cannot imagine myself thinking that the day after tomorrow
is Sunday, that the cube root of 27 is 3, and that I have arthritis in my
thigh without the resources of a public language. These are thoughts
that infralinguistic creatures, dogs and cats, simply cannot have. I am
quite happy to admit, that is, that some thoughts, perhaps a great many
thoughts, perhaps, indeed, all the thoughts I have each day, are language
dependent.10 But this does not tell us what we (or I) want to know. The
question is whether thought not my thoughts, not your thoughts, not
our thoughts, but thought is language dependent and, therefore, has a
social aspect. Is it possible for a creature that does not possess a language
to think and, if so, is it furthermore possible for it to do so in total
isolation? That is the question an answer to which would tell us something not just about the thoughts that people in fact have, but about
thought itself.
I have a view about the nature of thought that makes the existence
of such infralinguistic and socially isolated thought not only possible,
but, if I may risk an empirical conjecture, widespread. Such thought
exists in certain animals and in prelinguistic children. The view I am
talking about conceives of thought as a species of representation, and
representation, in turn, as a natural phenomenon bearing no essential
relation to language and social context. Some thoughts may have a social
character, and others may depend on language, but that is because they
are (like Clyde's thoughts about my car and my thoughts about the day
after tomorrow) the thoughts that they are. Thought itself is socially
neutral.

Norman Malcolm (1973: 460) accepts the Cartesian doctrine ("I agree, therefore, with
the Cartesians that thoughts cannot be attributed to animals that are without language")
but maintains that this is consistent with saying that animals think. Thinking, for Malcolm,
is not the same as having thoughts.
10 At times Burge seems to be suggesting that although thought may not have a social
character (it may not, for example, in nonlinguistic animals or infants), it does in creatures
that speak a language: "Crudely put, wherever the subject has attained a certain competence in large relevant parts of his language and has (implicitly) assumed a certain general
commitment or responsibility to the communal conventions governing the language's
symbols, the expressions the subject uses take on a certain inertia in determining attributions of mental content to him. In particular, the expressions the subject uses sometimes
provide the content of his mental states or events even though he only partially understands, or even misunderstands, some of them" (1979: 562).

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The only way I know to argue that thought lacks a social character is
to provide an example of an internal state of an animal that in no way
depends on the existence of other animals and is, arguably at least, a
thought. In order to give this example, in order to make it convincing,
I have to say something about what a representation is and why it is
plausible to regard thought as a kind of internal representation.
Representations are produced by objects or (in the case of biological
entities) organs by way of performing an indicator or informationproviding function. Think about an ordinary instrument the speedometer in your car, for instance. This device has the job of telling you
how fast the car is moving. It has the function of supplying this information. The way it performs its job is by means of a mobile pointer on
a calibrated scale. When things are working right, the position of the
pointer indicates, carries the information, that the car is going, say, 60
mph. When things are not working right, the gauge misrepresents the
speed of the car: it "says" the car is going 60 mph when the car is not
going this fast. The way the instrument "says" this, the way it performs
its job, is by adjusting the orientation of the pointer. Different positions
of the pointer are the instrument's representations, its (as it were)
"thoughts" about how fast the car is going. The instrument's power to
misrepresent the speed of the car, a power that any system must have in
order to qualify as an appropriate model for thought (since thoughts are
the sorts of things that can be false), is a power that derives from the
instrument's information-carrying function. A device that does not have
the function of indicating speed (even if it happens to indicate speed)
cannot misrepresent speed. That is why paper clips cannot, while thermometers can, misrepresent the temperature. Although both the mercury in the thermometer and the paper clips in my desk carry information about temperature, the thermometer has the function of providing
this information, while the paper clips do not. Thermometers can lie, at
least about the temperature; paper clips cannot.
If we think, then, of thoughts as something like internal representations, internal pointer readings, having an information-carrying function,
we can see how thoughts could be either true or false, depending on
whether they were doing their job right or not. This is grossly oversimplified, of course, because we are dealing with only the crudest
possible situations. But the basic idea, I hope, is clear.
In the case of artifacts (like instruments, diagrams, gauges, and language), the functions that convert an otherwise eligible event or condition (one that can carry the relevant information) into a representation

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come from us. They are conventional in the same way that all symbols
are conventional. We determine what the function of these artifacts will
be and, hence, whether they will produce representations and, if so, of
what. Since thought is not conventional, at least not in this way, the
functions that convert otherwise eligible internal events and conditions
in the nervous system into representations (and, hence, thoughts) are
natural, not conventional. Just as they give the heart a certain bloodpumping function, evolutionary histories give various sense organs their
information-providing function thereby making our experience of the
world, the product these organs produce by way of performing their
function, a (sensory) representation of the world. Learning (or so I have
argued in Dretske 1988) also gives rise to elements that have an informational function. Such items are the concepts essential to thought.
Thoughts are the internal representations whose information-providing
function has been acquired in learning, the kind of learning wherein is
acquired the concepts needed to have these thoughts.
This is a stripped-down version of a view about the nature of
thought. It happens to be my view, but that is irrelevant for the purposes
to which I want to put it. I haven't, I know, given you enough of the
view to convince you of its many and fulsome merits. But that, too,
isn't necessary. I have given enough of it, I hope, to provide the backdrop of the example that I now want to develop. For with this theory
in the background, what I hope to give you is the example I promised
an example of something that is, arguably at least, a thought and that is
free of all social implications. What I will provide is a description of a
normal learning process in which an internal structure develops that has
representational content. It not only has an appropriate content, it helps
explain the actions of the animal in which it occurs. If you agree with
me that this is, indeed, what I have succeeded in describing, then I hope
you will also agree with me that what I have described is, arguably at
least, a thought. It will also be something that is devoid of all social
character. If you do not agree with me that what I have described is a
thought, I hope you will at least agree with me that it is thoughtlike in
character, the sort of thing that, if it got enough companions of the right
kind, a (so to speak) critical mass of such representational neighbors,
then it would be a thought. I'll settle for this.
Consider, then, the following story about a generic animal I will call
Buster. Buster lives in a place where there are furry worms. I will call
them (naturally enough) furms. Furms come in all sizes and colors, but
they all are furry (F) and they are all shaped like worms (W). Since they

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are the only things in Buster's habitat that are both furry and wormshaped, the properties F and W suffice to identify an object as a furm in
this environment.
Furms and their salient features are observable by Buster. By this I
mean that, thanks to evolution, Buster comes into the world equipped
with sensory mechanisms that register such things as the shape and color,
the movement and orientation, the texture and size of middle-sized
objects like furms. Although he might have to learn where to look for
them, Buster doesn't have to learn to see them. Since they are all around
him, all he has to do to see them is open his eyes.
But although Buster is, from birth, equipped to see furms, he has no
instinctive, no genetically programmed, reaction to them. They are not,
in this respect, like bright lights, hot surfaces, loud noises, and fleas on
the rump, objects to which he has an instinctive, a genetically determined, response. Buster doesn't withdraw or hide from, snarl or stare at,
attack or bite furms. Or, if he does, this is not to a furm as a furm, but
as (say) an obstacle in his path, something blocking his line of sight, or
as something moving in the grass. Buster might, out of curiosity, sniff at
a furm, poke at it, step on it, or watch it if it does something unusual,
but a furm for Buster, initially at least, is much what a tree, a bush, or a
rock is to us: just one of the many uncategorized things in our environment that we cannot help see when our eyes are open but to which,
prior to learning, we pay little attention.
What I am asking you to imagine, of course, is an animal who can
and does experience objects of a particular kind (furms) but an animal
who as yet has developed no capacity to respond to them as objects of a
particular type. Buster does not yet have the concept FURM. Although
he can experience furms, and in this sense (if this is a sense) internally
represent them, he does not yet have beliefs of the sort: that is a furm.
There is a difference, as we all (I hope) know, between seeing a furm
and having a belief that it (what one sees) is a furm, a difference that
only learning is capable of bridging.11 If Buster is to develop the capacity
to believe of the furms he sees that they are furms, if he is to see them as
furms, he has to develop a new way of representing them. Unlike
Buster's experiences of furms, the sensory mechanisms for which are
11 If the reader doubts this, think about (say) trapezoids. You could see trapezoids (the ones
the teacher drew on the board) long before you could see them as trapezoids, long before
you were able to recognize or identify them as trapezoids (see that they were trapezoids).

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innate, nature did not equip Buster to have furm beliefs. He has to get
that for himself.
One day, out of idle curiosity, Buster sniffs at a large red furm and
thereupon experiences a painful stinging sensation in his nose. Buster
thereafter avoids large red furms. The same thing happens again with a
small green furm. In a short time we find Buster behaving in a way we
would all agree is intelligent: he avoids furms. He no longer sniffs at
them. When they approach, he quickly retreats. Why? How is one to
explain Buster's behavior?
Let me put this explanatory question in a special context so as to
clarify just what we are seeking when we ask to have Buster's behavior
explained. Imagine that we put Buster in a contrived, an artificial,
situation in which there are fake furms (caterpillars or, if you like,
mechanical furms), objects that are both furry and wormlike but not
furms. Buster spots a fake furm approaching, and he quickly withdraws.
A newly arrived observer wants to know why. Why did Buster retreat?
He didn't do this before. What is the explanation of Buster's behavior?
First Try: Buster withdrew because he saw a furm coming toward him.
This cannot be the right answer since Buster did not see a furm
coming toward him. It was not a furm.
Second Try: Buster withdrew because he saw what looked like a furm
(something that was both F and W) coming toward him.
Once again, this explanation (like the first explanation) attempts to
explain Buster's behavior without invoking a belief that Buster has about
the object he sees. He retreats, we are told, because he sees something
fitting a certain description, just as one might pull one's hand away from
a surface fitting a certain description "hot."
But this, too, cannot be the right explanation. At least it cannot be
the full explanation. Prior to his painful encounters with furms, Buster
saw what looked like furms coming toward him (in this case they
actually were furms), objects that were both F and W, and Buster did
not withdraw. He had exactly the same experience then, before learning,
that he is having now, after learning, the sort of experience that constitutes his seeing an approaching furm. Now he withdraws; then he did
not. Now the experience triggers withdrawal movements; then it did
not. Why? What is the difference? That, surely, is the question we need
answered in order to understand why Buster is withdrawing, and that

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question is not answered by describing what Buster sees. It sounds more

like the kind of question that is answered by describing what Buster
believes about what he sees.
The attempt to explain Buster's behavior by mentioning what he sees
is an attempt to explain his behavior in terms of what I have called a
triggering cause. Typically, in this sort of situation, a triggering cause is
some environmental event that causes a person to believe something. In
seeking explanations of behavior, though, we seek what I called a structuring, not a triggering, cause of the behavior we are trying to understand. We often mention triggering causes in giving an explanation of a
person's behavior, but the explanation succeeds, works, only if it suggests
or implies something about what the triggering cause causes the person
to believe. You understand why I ran if I tell you I ran because I saw a
lion coming after me. This explanation works, though, only because
you assume that seeing a lion coming at me caused me to believe that a
lion was coming at me. If I was not caused to believe this, then you do
not know why I ran even if you know that an approaching lion (or my
seeing an approaching lion) caused me to run.
This is why the second attempt at an explanation fails. It doesn't tell
us what, if anything, Buster believes about what he sees. It only tells us
what he sees. But he saw furry worms before and he didn't run. So it
cannot be seeing furry worms that explains his running.
Third Try: Buster withdraws because he thinks it is a furm and he is
afraid of farms.
If, at this early stage of learning, this description sounds a bit too
fancy for Buster, we can say that he withdraws because he thinks it (the
approaching object) is one of those furry (F), wormy (W) objects that
stings his nose (S) when it gets too close. Call this the FWS (furrywormy-stinger) concept of furms. Buster runs because he thinks it (the
furry worm he sees) is a FWSer and he does not want to get stung.
We have been drawn, irresistibly, into new territory. We are now
giving rational explanations of Buster's behavior, explanations in terms
of what Buster thinks and what Buster wants (or fears). We may suppose
that Buster was motivated to avoid pain, wanted to avoid it, long before
his painful encounters with the furms. This, we may assume, is a longstanding, a more or less fixed, instinct or desire. But if we want to credit
a belief to Buster, and it seems hard to resist this temptation, we must
suppose that such a belief, or the capability of holding such a belief,
emerged in his learning experience with the furms.

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All this strikes me as fairly obvious. This is what concept formation is

all about. A brief learning episode of this sort is enough to credit an
animal like Buster with a rudimentary concept, a concept essential for
the holding of the sort of belief that will, when a relevant piece of
behavior occurs, and in association with appropriate motivational states
and other beliefs, explain why Buster does what he does.
What Buster develops during his brief but painful encounter with
furms is a way of representing them that goes beyond the sensory
mechanisms he was given at birth, beyond what it takes to see furms.
Buster (we are assuming) was always getting information about the furms
in his environment. They have a distinctive look, a look that only furms
have, and he could see them, could see the features (F and W) that set
furms apart from other objects. Although he was getting this information, he wasn't, before learning, doing anything with it. That changed.
Now the information sufficient unto identifying something as a furm is
being put to work. It has, as it were, been given a job to do, the job of
getting Buster out of range. It has been harnessed to control mechanisms
so as to coordinate Buster's behavior with the environmental conditions
in which such behavior is beneficial. Something in Buster, his experience of furms, that earlier, before learning, indicated the presence of F
(furriness) and W (wormyness) has come to have the function of indicating furms: F, W, and S. On a representational model of beliefs, this is
to say that something in Buster has come to play the part of a belief, the
belief that that object (the one he sees) is a furm (or a FWSer).
If we accept this account of things, then, since Buster thinks it is a
furm approaching, and the process wherein he came to think this does
not require the existence of any conscious being (the fact that furms are
animals plays no essential part in this story; they could as well have been
thorny tumbleweeds), the conclusion is inescapable: thought, the development of representational powers of this sort, does not require a social
context. Buster could have this thought even if he was the only conscious being in the universe.
The moral of the story about the extrinsicness of belief is not, however, so clear. For in this story Buster acquired his concept of a furm by
interacting with furms. Take away the furms (or imagine the FWs
without the S) and you take away Buster's concept of a furm (a FWSer)
hence, his belief that approaching objects are furms. This, of course, is
exactly the moral I would like to draw. Concepts, in the first instance at
least, have an origin in the learning experiences with the kinds of which
they are concepts. Since, however, I have no argument that this learning

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process is necessary for all concept formation I have no argument that

thought is essentially extrinsic. I leave that as a more or less plausible
conjecture.
In closing, however, let me return to motivations, the problem I
described at the beginning. If you will recall, I suggested that one reason
for denying that thought was extrinsic, and therefore social, was the
difficulty in seeing how thought, if it had this character, could figure in
the explanation of behavior. I think Buster's story helps one to understand how this is possible. The internal elements in Buster that become
representations (of furms) by acquiring the function (of indicating their
presence) do so in the very process in which control circuits governing
the reaction to furms are reconfigured. Internal elements become
thoughts about, representations of, furms at the same time as are created
the neural structures underlying the production of output (hence, the
kind of future behavior that thought will be called upon to explain).
The representational aspect of thought, although extrinsic, is causally
relevant to behavior because what is represented determines what it is
that these representations end up doing in the system. Change what
these internal structures represent and, through the learning process, you
change the causal organization of the system in which these structures
occur. You thereby change what these structures do. That is how
thought content is made relevant to behavior.
Thoughts have been described as maps by means of which we steer.
I like this metaphor. Maps are representations, and their power to steer
is their role in the determination of output. What we see in Buster's
case is the way an internal map, the power of thought, is created in the
very process in which that map gets its hand on the steering wheel.
Such, I submit, is the way thoughts, qua thoughts, are relevant to what
we do.
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All page references in the text are to Rosenthal.
Burge, T. 1982: "Other Bodies," in Andrew Woodfield (ed.), Thought and Object:
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Burge T. 1990: "Wherein Is Language Social?" in C. Anthony Anderson and Joseph

Owens (eds.), Propositional Attitudes, Stanford, Calif.: CSLI.
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Woodfield, A. 1982a: "Foreword," in Andrew Woodfield (ed.), Thought and Object:
Essays on Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Woodfield, A. 1982b: "On Specifying the Contents of Thoughts," in Andrew
Woodfield (ed.), Thought and Object: Essays on Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon
Press.

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14
Norms, History, and the
Constitution of the Mental

No one doubts that the mind evolved. What would be surprising is if it

had to evolve if the mind not only had a history, but a history essential
to its very existence.
Surprising though it is, some people think this is so.1 Of those who
think it so, some think it because they discern, or think they discern, a
normative quality to mental affairs, a way mental states and activities
(qua mental) are supposed to be, that can be understood only by conceiving of them as products of a historical process. Without a process like
natural selection or learning, processes capable of grounding a difference
between how things are and how they are supposed to be, there is
nothing to provide the requisite contrast with existing fact, the sort of
contrast we normally invoke by speaking of how things should be or
behave. Objects that materialize wholly by accident, for instance, have,
at the first moment of their existence (before acquiring an appropriate
history), no purpose, no way they are supposed to be or behave. Such
objects (so it is said) can harbor no meaning or content hence, no
capacity for reason, judgment, or experience - states and activities that

My thanks to the participants of the Notre Dame Conference on Varieties of Dualism

(March 1998) for useful feedback and criticism on an earlier draft of this essay. I specially
want to thank John O'Leary-Hawthorne, Fritz Warfield, Al Plantinga, and Marian David
for helpful comments.
Certainly Millikan (1984, 1995), Papineau (1993) and Dretske (1986, 1995), and, depending on which way they go on representation, probably also Lycan (1997 - see p. 75, where
he expresses sympathy with a teleological view of representation) and Tye (1995 - see
Sections 5.4 and 7.4). Neander (1995) insightfully explores a teleological (thus, historical)
view of representation without actually defending it.

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presuppose norms. History is to minds what it is to fossils. Without the

right history, there aren't any.
Since the arguments for this view are not entirely convincing even
to someone like me who accepts their conclusion and the consequences of the view, I keep being told, are preposterous,2 I take this
occasion to reexamine the matter. If I am to continue believing not just
that the mind is a product of historical development (we all believe that),
but, like a fossil, can exist only in that way, I need better reasons than
I've already got. I'm not sure I can produce them, but I hope the
exercise of looking for them will prove philosophically useful. It was for
me.

1. NORMATIVE CONCEPTS

Philosophers of science used to worry a lot about theory-laden concepts.

A theory-laden concept is one whose correct application to an object
presupposes that a certain theory, or fragment of a theory, is true of that
object. There cannot be objects of that sort, objects to which the
concept applies, unless the theory, or theory-fragment, is true. Showing
the theory false has the consequence that a concept loaded with it (and,
therefore, implying the truth of it) applies to nothing. There are no such
objects.
Norwood Russell Hanson (1958) did much to sensitize philosophers
to theory-laden concepts and the role they played in science. He used
the ordinary concept of wound to illustrate the idea. To be a wound it is
not enough to be a cut or incision in a person's flesh, the sort of gash
an assailant might make in wounding a person. To qualify as a wound,
the cut must have a particular origin, a certain kind of history. Surgeons
do not wound patients on whom they perform appendectomies (not, at
least, if they are doing their job right) even though the cuts they make
may be indistinguishable from genuine wounds. When made by a surgeon for an approved medical reason, the incision is not made with the
A favored way of dramatizing this is by invoking Swampman, a creature imagined by
Donald Davidson (1987), who materializes by chance when a bolt of lightning strikes a
decaying log in a swamp. Miraculously, Swampman is, molecule for molecule, the same as
Davidson. Since Swampman has no significant history certainly none of the kind that
would (according to historical accounts of the mind) give him thoughts and (maybe even)
experiences he lacks these mental states even though he is physically and (therefore)
behaviorally indistinguishable from Davidson. Swampman is a zombie.

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right purpose to qualify as a wound. It has the wrong history. Having

the right history is, if you will, the "theory" the concept wound is loaded
with.
Concepts come laden with norms as well as theories and history.3
Think of the difference between murdering and killing. Murder is a normloaded concept because it requires the killing to be done in a morally or
legally objectionable way. To murder X is to kill X wickedly, with
malice aforethought, inhumanely, or barbarously. That is why you can't
murder (although you can kill) someone accidentally or while trying to
save her life. When accidental (or when done with benevolent motives),
the killing isn't bad, wrong, wicked, or malicious4 - hence, not murder.
People may disagree about whether abortion is murder, but, often, the
disagreement isn't about whether abortion involves killing a fetus. It is a
disagreement about whether the killing is morally wrong. Thus, murder
is, while killing is not, norm-laden.
This is not to say that killings can't be wrong. Of course they can. It
is just that killings are not whereas murders are necessarily wrong.
Murders depend on norms for their very existence. Killings do not.
Take away norms and, in one stroke, you extinguish murder, just as
wounds are eliminated by removing their history. Killings and cuts
remain, yes, but not wounds and murder.
The evaluations implied by describing an act as murder are moral (or
perhaps legal) evaluations. There are other kinds of norms. Being broken,
for instance, is one of a cluster of terms that imply something about how
objects to which it applies are, in some nonmoral and nonlegal sense,
supposed, or supposed not, to be. To say that a bone (leg, toy, window) is
broken implies that the bone (leg, toy, window) is not in the condition
it is supposed to be in. If it was designed (e.g., the toy), it is not in the
condition it was designed to be in. Aside from the intentions of its
designer (or, perhaps, a certain kind of history more of this later),
nothing is broken. If you or I (or God) deliberately make a thing the

The following discussion of norm-loaded concepts is, I think, independent of what view
one takes of the embedded norms. If one is a subjectivist about these things - thinking,
perhaps, that to say that something is wrong (bad, not the way it ought to be, etc.) is
merely to assert (or evince) personal feelings and attitudes toward it (e.g., that you don't
like or approve of it), then norm-laden concepts are concepts that S cannot correctly apply
to x unless S (not necessarily anyone else) has the right feelings or attitudes toward x. For
a recent defense of an "expressivist" analysis of norms see Gibbard (1990).
Although something else may be bad or wrong - e.g., the negligence (driving while drunk)
that led to the accident. Thus, the result may still be labeled murder.

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way it is in order to illustrate a point, as a prototype, or as a work of

abstract art, it isn't broken. If it materialized randomly that way out of
cosmic dust, it isn't broken no matter how much it looks and behaves
like an object that (with a different history or created with different
intentions) is broken. Broken things have to have a history. If they don't,
they aren't broken.
Injury, healthy, strained, stretched, diseased, defective, flawed, ill, sick, damaged, spoiled, ruined, marred, contaminated, defiled, corrupted, infected, mal-

formed they are all like that. Nothing can be any of these things unless
it, or the processes leading up to it, are subject to norms. If something is
marred or damaged, for instance, it departs in some degree from a
standard that defines how it should be. Many of these standards come
from us, the designers and makers of devices. It is our purposes, the way
we want or intend things to be, that makes them when they fail to be
that way damaged, spoiled, malformed, flawed, and so on. If a gadget
is my creation, if I made it do a certain task, then it is broken, flawed,
defective, or broken if it doesn't do what I want it to do. If I want the
clock I build to lose time, if that was my purpose in building it this way,
then it isn't working right, it is broken or defective, if it doesn't lose
time.5 I am the origin of this norm.
Things are subject to multiple standards. Sometimes, for example, we
intend things to be in a condition they are not relative to some other
standard supposed to be in. There is no inconsistency in saying that an
object is supposed to be in a state that (relative to another standard) it is
not supposed to be in.

2. ARE MENTAL CONCEPTS NORMATIVELY LOADED?

If mental concepts are normatively loaded, then minds (or those parts of
the mind that we pick out with norm-laden concepts) cannot exist
without norms. This gives rise to a problem: where do these norms
come from? They certainly cannot come from us from our intentions,
purposes, and desires the way the norms governing our own creations
(e.g., my slow-running clock) come from us since the norms we now
seek are ones on which intentions, purposes, and desires themselves
5

If one thinks of clocks as functional devices - objects that are supposed to tell the right time
- then the gadget I build, not having that function, is not a clock. Whatever it is, though,
it is supposed to run slowly - i.e., more slowly than a proper clock.

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depend for their existence. So the norms constituting these mental states
have to come from somewhere else. Where?
This is a problem if mental concepts are norm-laden. But are they?
Some of them seem to be. Mistakes, after all, are (according to my
dictionary) beliefs, judgments, or takings that are in some way wrong,
bad, or improper. One cannot believe, perceive, or infer without risking
misrepresentation, illusion, and fallacy. That is part of the game. Maybe
cognition can occur (in an omniscient being?) without error, but the
possibility of mistake, the possibility of getting it wrong, of committing
a fallacy, is part of what we mean when we speak of someone as judging,
inferring, or concluding that so-and-so is true. If, then, the possibility of
mistake (if not mistakes themselves) is part of what we mean in describing an act or practice as cognitive, then cognition is norm-laden in the
sense that nothing merits this description unless there are, somewhere in
the background, norms relative to which states and activities can be
deemed wrong, bad, or incorrect. If you can't make a mistake, if what
you are doing isn't the sort of thing in which mistakes are possible, then
what is happening might be described as digestive or immunological,
but it isn't cognitive. It is not believing, judging, reasoning, perceiving,
or inferring.
At one time this line of reasoning seemed right to me, and I took it
to show that there was a problem for naturalistic accounts of the mind.
The problem or what seemed to me a problem was to determine
the source of these cognitive norms. Where did they come from? How
does one get a mental OUGHT, a SUPPOSED T O BE, from a biological IS? David Hume taught us that it is a fallacy to conclude that
something ought (morally) to be so from premises describing only what
is (as a matter of fact) so. Why isn't it also a fallacy to suppose (as
naturalistic theories of the mind do) that normatively loaded mental
states arise from, and are thus reducible to, the norm-free facts of physics
and biology?
One response to this problem (championed by Ruth Millikan, 1984,
1993) is that the facts of biology are not norm free. An organ's or a
trait's proper function roughly speaking, what it is selected to do is,
Millikan insists, itself a normative concept.6 If it is a thing's proper
function to do F, then it is supposed to do F. Thus, norm-laden cogni6

See also Neander (1995, p. 112), who says that biological norms underwrite semantic
norms. Not everyone agrees, of course, that natural selection yields norms. Foder (1996,
p. 252), Bedau (1993), Matthen (1997), and others are skeptics.

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tive discourse (Millikan 1993, p. 72, speaks of false beliefs as defective and
"true" and "false" as normative terms) can be grounded in biological
norms. There is no fallacious derivation of a cognitive OUGHT from a
biological IS, only a transformation of a biological into a cognitive
OUGHT. She describes her purpose (1993, p. 10) as defending this
biological solution to "the normativity problem," the problem of accounting for false beliefs, misperceptions, bad inferences, errors, and so
on. This, indeed, is why she speaks (in the title of her first book) of
language and thought as biological categories (Millikan 1984).
The problem to which Millikan's biological solution is a solution no
longer seems like a problem to me. Beliefs and judgments must be either
true or false, yes, but there is nothing normative about truth and falsity.
What makes a judgment false (true) is the fact that it fails (or succeeds)
in corresponding to the facts, and failing (or succeeding) in corresponding to the facts is, as far as I can see, a straightforward factual matter.
Nothing normative about it. An arrow (on a sign, say) can point to
Chicago or away from Chicago. There is a difference here, yes, but the
difference is not normative. Aside from our purposes in putting the sign
there or in using the sign as a guide, there is nothing right or wrong,
nothing that is supposed-to-be or supposed-not-to-be, about an arrow
pointing to Chicago. The same holds for beliefs. Aside from our purposes in forming beliefs or in using beliefs as guides to action, there is
nothing they should or shouldn't be. Chris Peacocke (1992, p. 126)
claims that "correct" and "incorrect" are normative notions because
whether X is correct or not depends on the way the world is. But
whether X is pointing at Chicago also depends on the way the world is.
It depends on where Chicago is. That doesn't make "pointing at Chicago" a normative expression.
For understandable reasons we dislike false beliefs and do our best to
avoid them. This dislike and avoidance leads us to describe false beliefs
in ways that are heavily normative as, for example, mistakes or misrepresentations where the prefix "mis" signifies that the judgment or belief
has gone amiss, that it is wrong, bad, or improper in some way. But the
practice of describing false beliefs in this normative way doesn't show
that there is anything essentially normative about false beliefs any more
than it shows that there is something essentially normative about the
weather (e.g., a blizzard) on the day of our picnic because we describe
it as awful. The fact that cognition requires the possibility of error, and
that errors are bad, does not mean that cognition requires norms not
unless errors are necessarily bad. But why should we believe this? Bad,

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yes, at least most of the time, but not necessarily bad. The only fault
with fallacious reasoning, the only thing wrong or bad about mistaken
judgments, is that, generally speaking, we don't like them. We do our
best to avoid them. They do not most of the time at least serve our
purposes. This, though, leaves the normativity of false belief and fallacious reasoning in the same place as the normativity of foul weather and
bad table manners in the attitudes, purposes, and beliefs of the people
who make judgments about the weather and table behavior.
Some have argued that it isn't truth and falsity that are norm-laden,
but the concept of belief itself. Beliefs by their very nature, and unlike
wishes, hopes, desires, and doubts (not to mention bicycles and rocks),
are mental states that aspire to truth and, therefore, fail or are defective
in some way when they are not true. A belief can be false, yes, just as a
(defective) heart can fail to pump blood, but a belief, even when false,
is supposed to be true, just as the defective heart is supposed to pump
blood. Beliefs aspire to truth; that is their job, their purpose, their raison
d'etre. Anything lacking this purpose just isn't a belief any more than a
device that isn't supposed to tell the right time is a clock. So if, in the
natural world, there are no OUGHTS, neither are there any beliefs.
I know this view is aggressively promoted,7 but I do not find it
plausible. I agree that beliefs are necessarily true or false. If I didn't
understand what it was to be true or false, I could hardly understand
what it was to be a belief. But I do not see that I need go further than
this. This seems like enough to distinguish beliefs from other mental
states like wishes, desires, hopes, doubts, and pains - not to mention
bicycles and rocks.8 Why, in order to understand what a belief is, do I
also have to think of a belief as something that is supposed to be true? If I
deliberately deceive you, is the resulting belief supposed to be true?

Paul Boghassian defended it at a conference in Palermo, Sicily, in August 1997, but I do

not attribute specific arguments to him since, lacking a copy of the paper, I am forced to
rely on my feeble memory of an oral presentation. Peacocke (in 1992, Chapter 5) argues
that content (hence, belief) is normative and Kripke (1982) that meaning (and presumably,
therefore, also thought) is. Also see Brandom (1994), in which a Kantian (vs. a Cartesian)
view is defended according to which mental states like judgment and belief (involving
concepts) are inherently normative. On the Kantian view of things, concepts have the form
of rules that bring with them entitlements and commitments. Peacocke and Brandom
distinguish different kinds of norms (Peacocke's"normative liaisons" are similar to Brandom's "consequential commitments"), but I think my arguments against the essential normativity of mental content apply to both.
Although it may not be enough to distinguish believing P from entertaining the thought
(or hypothesis) that P. For that we may need additional functional properties.

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Aren't people supposed to be deceived by a well-executed trompe l'oeil,

a magician's trick, or a clever disguise? My inclination is to say that such
beliefs are supposed to be false. My reason for saying this is the same as
my reason for saying that anything that one deliberately brings about
(e.g., a slow-running clock) is (given one's purposes) supposed to be the
way one intends it to be. So if I design a device to be (or produce) F, if
that is my purpose, the device, given my purpose, is supposed to be (or
produce) F. If F happens to be a false belief in you (or even in me), then
your (my) belief is supposed to be false in the same way my "clock" is
supposed to tell the wrong time.9
This debate (about the normativity of meaning or content) is sometimes put in terms of a concept's extension and the "rules" (hence,
norms) governing its application (see Kripke 1982). Concepts have extensions: cows and only cows are in the extension of the concept cow.
This concept can be correctly applied only to cows. If someone falsely
applies it (on a dark night) to a horse (i.e., believes of the horse that it is
a cow), this is an incorrect (i.e., false) application of the concept. So far,
so good. Aside from our desires and intentions to avoid what is false,
though, why is the false application of a concept something that is
wrong, bad, or improper? What rule or norm does it violate? A belief
that 37 plus 84 is 111 is certainly false; it does not correctly pick out a
trio of numbers that is in the extension of plus, but what rule is broken
by applying plus to these three numbers?
It will be said that if we do not care whether we get the right (correct,
true) answer or if we deliberately try to get a wrong answer then
what we are doing is not adding 37 and 84. We are fooling around,
doodling, or, perhaps, trying to make some observer think we don't
know how to add. But we are not adding. We can add 37 and 84 and
get the wrong answer, yes, just as we can break the rules of chess
(unintentionally or in an effort to cheat) and still be playing chess, but
in order to be properly described as adding two numbers (or playing
chess), we have to view ourselves as falling within the purview of the
rules (hence, norms) constituting the activity we are engaged in. We
must feel constrained by, a commitment to, the rules of arithmetic that
determine what the right answer is, just as, when playing chess, we are
supposed to follow the rules of the game. If we do not feel bound by

Recalling our early remark (about multiple standards), it may be objected that although the
belief, given my intentions, is supposed to be false, it is, given (merely the fact) that it is a belief,

supposed to be true. Perhaps, but what reason is there to think this is so?

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these rules, if we take to be irrelevant the criticism (in the case of

addition) that we forgot to carry the 1, then we are not really adding. In
this sense, addition is a rule (norm)-constituted activity as much so as
chess or baseball. The same is true of all concepts. Norms are built into
some would say they constitute the concepts we apply. If we do not
respect these norms, do not feel the entitlements and commitments they
give rise to, then we are not really applying these concepts.10
This, it seems to me, is a confusion between two quite different
things the norm-free concepts (meanings) we intentionally apply, on
the one hand, and, on the other, the norm-laden intentions with which
(or the actions in which) we apply them. All intentional acts, in virtue
of being intentional (or goal directed11), are subject to norms. You
cannot be hiding from a predator, driving to Chicago, or ironing your
shirt12 without intending to do all the things that you believe necessary
to do these things. You are not really hiding from X (although you may
be pretending to hide from X) if you have no care about whether X can
see you or if you deliberately make attention-grabbing noise. You are
not driving to Chicago if you ignore or take to be irrelevant information
to the effect that that isn't the way to Chicago. All intentional acts, in
virtue of being intentional, bring the actor under the purview of norms
in the sense that the actor is obliged (ought) to adopt the means she
believes necessary (in the circumstances) to do what she intends to do.
If the actor feels no constraints or obligation to do what she acknowledges to be necessary for doing A, then she is not not really

10 I am grateful to Tim Schroeder for helpful discussion on this point. He convinced me

that what I said (in an earlier draft) on this point was much too superficial to capture the
position I was arguing against.
11 What I say in the text is probably better said about goal-directed activities and the means
one adopts to achieve these goals (some things one does intentionally are not goal directed
in the relevant sense; one does them intentionally e.g., destroys the children's hospital but that isn't one's goal; the goal is the destruction of the nearby munitions plant), but I
skip over these complications here. I am grateful to Michael Bratman for clarification
here.
12 Some verbs (like "hide") have the relevant intentions already built in. Unlike driving to
Chicago (which you can do without intending to get to Chicago), you can't be hiding
from X without intending or trying to conceal yourself from X. I think adding is more
like hiding; you can't do it unintentionally. My intuitions about these matters (admittedly
shaky) tell me that if you unintentionally add two numbers (while trying to multiply
them, say), you were not (at the time you added them) adding them. You were multiplying them. I shall here assume that the actions I describe (e.g., driving to Chicago, ironing
your shirt) are intentional in the relevant sense directed at a goal (of, e.g., getting to
Chicago, ironing your shirt).

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intending to do A. The same is true in applying concepts. If the act (of

applying the concept) is intentional, it will come under the purview of
norms, not because concepts or their application is a norm-governed
activity, but because the act of applying them, when it is intentional
generates a set of norms associated with the actor's intentions and desires.
Doing A intentionally commits the actor to doing the things she believes
necessary to doing A and, thus, exposes the actor to the norms (the
shoulds and supposed-tos) that such commitment brings with it. If the
application of concepts is not an intentional act as it isn't in the case
of perceptual judgment (e.g., seeing that the bottle is empty) - then, as
far as I can see, norms are absent. All that is left is truth or falsity.
This, by the way, is why conceptual role semantics (generally speaking, meaning as use) is so much more plausible for language than
thought. Saying (asserting, claiming) that P (unlike believing that P) is,
generally speaking, a purposeful, goal-directed action and, thus, the
language of entitlements, commitments, rules, and norms more easily
finds a home here. But, even here, I submit, the norms emerge from
the associated intentions, not from the meanings applied in the act.
There is, however, a tempting argument that purports to show that a
certain class of beliefs in fact, perceptual beliefs are norm-laden. The
argumentative strategy is a bit different from the one we have so far
considered in that it argues not that history is needed to explain the
essential normativity of cognition, but, rather, that normativity is a
consequence of the kind of history that cognition is (independently)
laden with. The argument goes like this. Perception has the job, the
function, the purpose of providing information to (higher) cognitive
centers for the guidance of action. Since this is the job of perceptual
systems, they are not doing their job, not doing what they are supposed
to be doing, if they do not deliver information. If, then, one thinks (as
it is natural to think) of information as something requiring a more or
less reliable correspondence between input (world) and output (experience and belief), then it follows that the output of perceptual processes
perceptual experiences and beliefs is supposed to correspond in some
reliable way to the world about which it provides information. Experiences are, in this sense, supposed to be veridical and beliefs are, in this
sense, supposed to be true. If they are not, the systems producing them
are not doing what they are supposed to be doing. The normativity of
perceptual beliefs and experiences derives from the teleofunctions of the
mechanisms producing them, and the teleofunctions have their origin in
the historical (selectional) process that shaped those mechanisms.

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I came close to endorsing this argument in (Dretske 1995) see

especially p. 4 but, as it stands, it doesn't pass muster. Given the fact
that perceptual systems have an evolutionary history, it may in fact be
their job (= biological function) to provide the brain (and resident
control mechanisms) with information about the environment in and
on which actions are to be performed, but that, by itself, isn't enough
to show that perceptual concepts are norm-laden. It isn't enough to
show that perceptual beliefs and experiences cannot exist without norms
and the historical (selectional) processes that ground those norms. For
we don't yet have an argument that the teleofunctions that give rise to
those norms are essential to perceptual experiences and beliefs. Why, in
other words, can't we agree that perceptual systems (just like the kidneys, heart, and lungs) have biological functions that they obtain from a
process of natural selection and, given these functions, are supposed to
do various things whatever it is their function to do? If they don't do
those things, they are broken, malfunctioning, diseased, or impaired in
some way. They fail to measure up to the norms that their historical
development makes applicable to them. Why can't we say all this and
still deny that such a historical development is necessary to the beliefs
and experiences, qua beliefs and experiences, that these systems produce? Why is the history essential? If an organ actually supplies information to Swampman's brain in the usual way (as it will if Swamp man
is molecularly indistinguishable from Donald Davidson), and this information is actually used (as it will be) to negotiate Swampman's way
through his environment, why should we deny that this is perception
simply because the information is being provided by organs that (lacking an appropriate history) lack the biological function of supplying it?
Lacking the relevant functions, they are not supposed to supply it, yes,
but why is that critical to the mentality of the process and its products?
That is exactly what the arguments we have so far been examining
(those that appeal to the norm-laden character of cognition) were attempting to supply, and, given their failure, what we still lack convincing arguments for.
3. INTENTIONALITY
What we have so far concluded is that although we may need history to
explain norms, we do not need history to explain mentality because
mentality, although subject to norms, is not constituted by them. At

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least we do not yet have an argument that it is. Mistakes are bad, yes,
and, generally speaking, given our cognitive purposes, beliefs ought to
be true and experiences veridical. But the norms implied by these evaluative judgments are the norms we bring to cognitive affairs. They have
the same source current attitudes and purposes - as do the norms
applied to the weather on the day of a picnic and rude behavior at the
dinner table. Take away these attitudes and purposes and you eliminate
the norms that make false beliefs mistakes, but you do not eliminate false
beliefs. A belief just like the weather - is independent of the norms
we apply to it. As we have seen, there are norms that are independent
of our purposes and attitudes. We can still say that, given their evolutionary history, and independent of what we may happen to desire and
intend, perceptual mechanisms are supposed to provide us with information about our environment and that, therefore, perceptual beliefs are
supposed to be true. We can say this in the same way we say that the
heart is supposed to pump blood and the liver is supposed to aid in
digestion and excretion. But the norms implied in these judgments,
although historically grounded, are not essential to the cognitive products of these historical processes. We do not need to suppose at least
we have not yet found a reason to suppose that such an evolutionary
history is essential to the perceptual processes and states that are its
products.
There is, however, the possibility that history, although not required
for the normativity of cognition, is required for some other aspect of
our mental life.13 This is a possibility I mean to raise in the remainder of
this article. The upshot of this brief look will be that although we do
not need history to explain the normativity of mental affairs, we may

13 The fact that history may be needed to explain the intentionality, not the normativity, of
the mental is not always clearly distinguished. Neander (1995, p. 110), for example, speaks
of grounding intentionality in biological facts (functions) but then (p. 112) says that
functions are needed to underwrite the normative notion of mental (semantic) content.
Millikan moves back and forth between intentionality and normativity as the feature of
mental affairs that proper functions are supposed to ground. MacDonald (1989, especially
p. 189), has a clear discussion of these matters.
Incidentally (in Dretske 1986) I described misrepresentation as a problem for a naturalistic approach to the mind, but I did not clearly specify whether I thought this problem
was a normative problem or just a problem about intentionality. I don't think I was clear
about it then. History, I would now say, is necessary for misrepresentation, not because
representation (or misrepresentation) is essentially normative, but because it is essentially
intentional.

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need it - at least it is an attractive possibility - to explain another fact

that is essential to cognitive affairs: the aboutness or intentionality of
cognitive states.14
Thought and experience are intentional in the philosopher's sense of
this word; that is, they are about things, and the things they are about
need not exist in order for one to think about or experience them. If
one need not stand in any actual relation to orange things in order to
think about them, what makes one's thoughts about them? What makes
a thought that pumpkins are orange a thought that they are orange
rather than yellow or blue? What makes perceptions (dreams, hallucinations) of orange things phenomenally so different from perceptions
(dreams, hallucinations) of blue things? If we begin by assuming, as I do,
that experiences and thoughts are resident in the brain some condition
of or activity in this gray neural mass what makes some conditions of
this gray matter about orange, while others are about blue and still others
are about nothing at all?
One attractive answer to this question is that although intentional
relations (i.e., aboutness, meaning, reference) are not real relations (real
relations require the existence of their relata), intentional relations (I will
call them "semantic connections") can be analyzed into real relations if
(only if?) the relationships that ground semantic connections are realized
in the past. What makes this bit of stuff, A, about that bit of stuff, B,
what establishes the semantic connection between them, is not that A
and B stand in some relation to one another (that can't be right since B
need not even exist for A to be about it), but, instead, that A (or
appropriate ancestors earlier tokens of type A) and B (or earlier
tokens of B) stood in appropriate relations to each other. If no existing
relationship makes this bit of brain matter about orange pumpkins, then
maybe it is the brain's past relationship to orange pumpkins (or orange
things and pumpkins) that fixes this semantic connection.
The thought here (I'm putting it pretty crudely; but I'm trying to
capture an intuition, not construct airtight arguments) is that if I, a
thinker and experiences can get myself connected to things that don't
exist (perhaps never existed), and if such connections are not secured by
14 I do not assume (although I argue for it elsewhere - Dretske 1995) that intentionality is
the "mark of the mental." Arguably, at least, itches, tickles, and pains (mental states in
good standing) do not possess it. Nonetheless, I do assume (without here arguing) that
intentionality is an essential characteristic of cognitive states. Such mental states and processes as perception, memory, judgment, and inference involve representation, and representation, I assume, is intentional.

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actual relations to the sort of thing I am now connected with, then

actual relations might have done their work in the past. Being "connected" to orange pumpkins thinking about or experiencing them might require an appropriate history because that is the only way existing
connections with (possibly) nonexisting objects can be grounded in
nonintentional (i.e., real) relations. If some bit of gray matter is about
the color orange (in the way an experience is of the color orange) and
there does not exist, at the time of the experience, anything that is
orange, then, just possibly, what makes this gray matter about orange
(rather than red or blue) is its past relations to orange things.15
This, I admit, is a pretty creaky argument. Those who do not share
my reductionistic proclivities (or my blinkered vision of what it takes to
properly ground a semantic connection) will not be attracted by it.16 It
depends on a philosophically questionable assumption that semantic connections must be grounded in real relations to existing objects. It depends, that is, on the assumption that if S (a conscious being) is V to (|)
(where V is a verb describing S's semantic connection to <|)), then this
connection between S and <|) must be the result of relations S (or a
relevant ancestor of S) bore to (|)-ish objects in the past. This is not an
assumption that is likely to go unchallenged. It is a variant of the
15 I skip over complications relating to primitive vs. complex concepts. Obviously one can
think about a unicorn without ever having been related to a unicorn in the past. But the
idea (an old idea) is that one's capacity to think about unicorns (a complex concept)
depends on past relations to the constituents of that concept horse, one, and horn.
16 Nor will those, like Jerry Fodor (1990), who think that semantic connections can be
established by real relations between universal properties (assuming that counterfactual
supporting dependency relations count as real relations). I don't have the space to say why
I think this doesn't work. It would take at least another essay. Suffice it to say that I do
not think Fodor's (Asymmetric Dependence) theory of mental content avoids the relevance of history to mental content. It merely hides it. I have two reasons for thinking
this: (1) To counter objections to his "pure" theory, Fodor offers (1990, p. 121) a
modified theory. The second condition of this modified theory is a historical condition:
Some "Xs" (symbols in the head) are actually caused by Xs (the external conditions they
are symbols of). (2) Even if Fodor should retreat to his "pure" theory (which contains no
such explicit historical condition), I think the dependency he speaks of is, in fact, a
dependency between actual conditions in the world and not, as he alleges, a dependency
between nomic relations. Such dependencies, I would argue, are historical dependencies:
A depends on B because A was caused by B and would not (as a matter of historical fact)
have occurred if B had not occurred. How can there be a law between Xs (a kind of
worldly event) and causing "Xs" (where "X" is a condition of the brain) when the
relation between these two properties depends on the actual constitution of an animal's
nervous system? Clearly, it seems to me, there is no law here, only a condition (of a
nervous system) that supports a causal relation, a condition whose dependency relations
to other conditions are historically derived.

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methodological idea (reductionism) that Jerry Fodor expressed by saying

that if intentionality is real, it is really something else. Nonetheless, I
find it plausible. But then I would. I'm a reductionist. I think this
assumption or something close to it is probably true.
The manner in which concepts like thought and experience are, according to this approach, history-laden is, I admit, different from the way
that concepts like murder and impaired are norm-laden. Certain necessary
connections lie on the surface; others do not. Almost anyone, after a few
minutes' reflection, will agree that if something is broken or impaired,
it is not in a condition, or not behaving, the way it should be. Everyone,
not just philosophers, will agree that murder has, while killing lacks, an
evaluative character. That, it seems, is just part of what we all mean
and would, furthermore, readily admit to meaning in describing a
killing as murder. But not everything that is necessary for the correct
application of a concept lies so close to the surface. Some connections
are more deeply buried. The relations between intentional concepts and
history are like that. Although they are deeply buried, they are, I submit,
recoverable. They are recoverable in the same way the (for me) less
obvious historical implications of concepts like wound, broken, and impaired are recoverable. Or (if causal theorists are right as I believe they
are) the way that the relation between seeing (X) and causation (of perceptual experience by X) is recoverable. If it is, indeed, true that you
cannot see (hallucinate and dream of, yes, but not see) the Eiffel Tower
unless the Eiffel Tower is actually (part of) the cause of your experience,
and if it is also true (as it appears to be) that this fact is not evident on
casual not even prolonged reflection to many people, then I see no
reason why the relationships between intentional concepts and their
historical antecedents must be evident. The fact that they are not evident
is no more an objection to the historical nature of intentional (representational, semantic) concepts than it is to the causal character of perceptual
concepts.
Where does that leave us? It leaves us with a conclusion - that
intentional concepts are history-laden - the plausibility of which depends, critically, on the questionable premise that semantic connections
must be grounded in genuine relationships. There are other questionable
premises, but this one, I think, is the most contentious. I think it is true,
but others will surely disagree. I do not know how to convince them
I'm right. All I can do is ask what else, besides historical antecedents,
could ground a semantic connection. If nothing else could, then inten-

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tional concepts are history-laden. Swampman is a zombie. If something

else could, what is it?

REFERENCES

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Wagner & R. Warner, eds. Notre Dame, IN; University of Notre Dame Press,
pp. 23-51.
Brandom, R. 1994. Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press.
Coates, P. 1997. Meaning, mistake and miscalculation. Minds and Machines, 7.2,
pp. 171-197.
Davidson. D. 1987. Knowing one's own mind. Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association, 60, 441-458.

Dennett, D. 1996. Granny versus Mother Nature - No contest. Mind and Language,
11.3, pp. 263-269.
Dretske, F. 1986. Misrepresentation. In Belief: Form, Content, and Function, R. Bogdan, ed. Oxford; Clarendon Press.
Dretske, F. 1995. Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA; MIT Press.
Fodor, J. 1990. A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA; MIT Press.
Fodor, J. 1996. Deconstructing Dennett's Darwin. Mind and Language, 11.3,
pp. 246-262.
Gibbard, A. 1990. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge, MA; Harvard University
Press.
Hanson, N. R. 1958. Patterns of Discovery. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.
Kitcher, P. 1993. Function and design. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XVIII. Notre
Dame, IN; University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 379-397.
Kripke, S. 1982. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Oxford; Blackwell.
Lycan, W. 1997. Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge, MA; MIT Press.
Lycan, W. 1990a. Introduction (to Part II). Mind and Cognition: A Reader. Oxford;
BlackweU, pp. 59-62.
Lycan, W. 1990b. Mind and Cognition: A Reader. W. Lycan, ed. Oxford; Blackwell.
MacDonald, G. 1989. Biology and representation. Mind and Language, 4.3, pp. 186
199.
Matthen, M. 1997. Teleology and the product analogy. Australasian Journal ofPhilosophy, 75.1, pp. 21-37.
Millikan, R . 1984. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories. Cambridge,

MA; MIT Press.

Millikan, R. 1989. In defense of proper functions. Philosophy of Science 56.2, pp. 288302. Reprinted in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice.
Millikan, R . 1993. Introduction. White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice.

Cambridge, MA; MIT Press.

Neander, K. 1991a. Functions as selected effects: the conceptual analyst's defense.
Philosophy of Science, 58.2, pp. 168-184.

Neander, K. 1991b. The teleological notion of function. Australasian Journal of

Philosophy, 69.4, pp. 454-468.

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Neander, K. 1995. Misrepresenting and malfunctioning. Philosophical Studies, 79:

109-141.
Papineau, D. 1993. Philosophical Naturalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Peacocke, C. 1992. A Study of Concepts. Cambridge, MA; MIT Press.
Tye, M. 1995. Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA; MIT Press,
van Gulick, R. 1990. Teleological views of intentionality. In Lycan 1990b, pp. 107128.

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15
Minds, Machines, and Money:
What Really Explains Behavior

According to a prevalent philosophical picture of the way mind and

body are related, the mind is to intentional action what money is to the
behavior of a vending machine. Just as coins are in (or get deposited in)
vending machines, beliefs, desires, and intentions are in, or get produced
in, us. And just as the right coins deposited in the machine cause it to
behave in a certain way to yield its contents: Coca-Cola, cigarettes, or
candy, as the case may be so the right mental entities occurring in us
cause us to perform various actions. Furthermore, just as what makes
money money is not its intrinsic character shape, size, and density of
the coins, for example but certain extrinsic or relational facts about
these coins (the fact that they possess monetary value), so too what
makes a belief a belief is not its intrinsic neurobiological character but,
rather, certain extrinsic facts about it the fact that it has a certain
meaning or content, the fact that it has certain intentional properties.
If we take this analogy seriously, it suggests that beliefs, qua beliefs,
are as irrelevant to animal behavior as is money, qua money, to the
behavior of vending machines. Since it is facts about the shape and size
of coins, not facts about their monetary value, that explain why coins
cause a machine to yield its contents, the analogy, if we take it seriously
and a good many philosophers do - compels us to conclude that it is
the intrinsic features of beliefs, their neurobiological properties, not their
extrinsic properties, their meaning or content, that explains why we do

Reprinted from Human Action, Deliberation and Causation, Philosophical Studies Series 77, ed.

Jan Bransen and Stefan Cuypers, pp. 157-173, copyright 1998 by Kluwer Academic
Publishers, with kind permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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what we do. We thus seem driven to the conclusion that what we

believe is causally irrelevant to what we do.
I do not think we are driven to this conclusion, although, I admit,
some people seem willing to drive there. It is the purpose of this essay
to say why this conclusion is not forced on us. Let me begin, then, by
enlarging the analogy.1
1. MONETARY-MACHINE INTERACTIONS
The United States government does its best to make the (legal) monetary
value of objects supervene on the intrinsic properties of the objects that
have that value. In the case of paper money, special watermarks, highquality paper, intaglio printing, and security strips (visible only with
transmitted light to frustrate photocopying) make successful counterfeiting difficult and increasingly rare. There are no (at least not many) non120 bills that look and feel exactly like real $20 bills. The same is true,
of course, of other denominations and coins. This is no accident. The
entire system of monetary exchange depends on it. For understandable
reasons, then, the U.S. Treasury Department is dedicated to maintaining
the strictest supervenience.
The monetary value of an object is a relational property of that object.
It has to do with its history was it produced in a mint or in someone's
basement? - and the economic practices of the community in which it
exists are such objects generally accepted as a medium of exchange in
the community? Since the usefulness of money depends on its easy
identification, governments make every effort to see to it that this
extrinsic property of money supervenes on the observable (intrinsic)
properties of money size, shape, markings, weight, and so on. If two
objects are observationally indiscernible, if they look and feel the same,
then (if the government is doing its job) they are indiscernible with
respect to monetary value. If it looks like a $20 bill, it is a $20 bill.
Another way of expressing this2 is to say that (as long as counterfeiting
is kept in check) monetary values (V) are necessarily realized (usually
multiply realized) in an object's intrinsic properties (S), and each value

After writing this essay I came across Allen (1995), in which a similar anlogy is developed
to reach a similar conclusion.
2 Corresponding to Kim's second formulation of weak supervenience (1984a). Although
citations are to individual articles, all page references to Kim are to Kim (1993b), in which
the individual essays are collected.

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of S has the same value of V. This corresponds to what Kim calls weak
supervenience.3

As a result of this (normally) widespread supervenience and the correlation associated with it, we can (and regularly do) use the fact that
something is money to predict and "explain" (more about the scare
quotes in a moment) the effects money has in transactions of various
sorts. Why did the cashier give me $8 in change? Because lunch cost
$12 and I gave her $20. Why didn't the vending machine give me the
candy I selected? Because I deposited only $0.55 and the candy bars cost
$0.65.
Are these familiar explanations really correct? Is the fact that I gave
the cashier $20 really the (or part of the) explanation of why she gave
me $8 change? Is the monetary value of the paper I gave her a causally
relevant property? The coins I deposited in the vending machine are
worth only $0.55, but is this fact relevant to why the machine did not
give me a candy bar? Is the value, the legal worth, of these coins a
causally casually relevant fact about them? I know we talk this way. I
know that everyday explanations of such results are replete with references to monetary value, but is this extrinsic property the causally relevant property?
It is important to understand that these are questions about the causal
relevance of an object's properties (its being worth $20), not the causal
efficacy of the objects (the $20 bills) that have these properties. These
are, in other words, questions about what explains the result, not what
causes it. Giving the cashier an object with a monetary value of $20
caused her to give me $8 change. About that there is no argument. The
question we are asking, though, is not whether a $20 bill is a causally
effective object, but whether its being a $20 bill explains its effectiveness.
Is the value of the paper I give her a fact about the paper that explains
the result of giving her the paper? What if I, instead, give her a piece of
paper that looks and feels exactly like a real $20 bill? Would the result
be different if we suppose the bill was a perfect counterfeit? No, of
course not. If she can't tell the difference, how could it be? Well, if we
At least it is a form of local weak supervenience - local to a given nation or economic unit.
Although it would complicate monetary exchanges, there is no reason why two countries
might not assign the same (type of) object different monetary values. If this happened, then,
even without counterfeiting, there would be local (i.e., national), but not global (international), supervenience. In speaking of monetary value supervening on the intrinsic properties of an object, I should, therefore, be understood as referring to a given country or
economic unit.

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really believe this, as I assume we all do, then why say that the cashier
gave me $8 change because I gave her $20? Giving her $20 is the cause,
but that it was $20 is not the explanation of her giving me $8 change.
The correct explanation is that I gave her a piece of paper that looked
and felt (to her) like a $20 bill. The causally effective properties, those
that explain why the effect occurs, are the intrinsic, the observable,
properties of the paper on which its being $20 supervenes, the properties
you and I, cashiers and machines, use to tell whether it is $20.
I am not, mind you, recommending that we change explanatory
practice. Although I am convinced that its being money is (in most
imaginable cases) totally irrelevant to the results obtained, I will go right
on explaining the results of monetary transactions in terms of the money
exchanged. Although we predict the behavior of vending machines by
mentioning the value of the money we put in them ("You have to
deposit $0.75 to get a Coke") we all know that it isn't the value of the
money that explains the result. It is the shape, size, weight, and (for
machines that take bills) visible marks of the objects we put in them that
explains why machines behave the way they do. An object with the
same S and a different V (a slug) would produce the same behavior.
Vending machines (not to mention store clerks) are equipped to detect
the shape, size, and density, but surely not the economic history, of the
objects they receive. We nonetheless pretend to explain machine behavior by mentioning the historical-social properties ($0.75) of the internal
objects (coins) that cause behavior. We ignore the intrinsic properties
that are causally relevant. We ignore them because, often enough, we
don't even know what they are. Nonetheless, given the facts of supervenience, we know that, normally, inserting $0.75 will get you a Coke
even if we don't know which properties of the $0.75 are responsible for
this effect (is density relevant?). V is, after all, multiply realizable in S.
We can use a variety of different coins, of different shapes and sizes, to
make $0.75. The machine will give us a Coke, it will behave in the
same way, if we insert quarters, dimes, and a nickel; or seven dimes and
a nickel; or fifteen nickels. As long as the coins add up to $0.75 we get
the same result. So it is simpler and much more convenient in our
explanations of machine behavior to mention the extrinsic V all the
different Ss have in common even though we know it is S, not V, that
explains the result. Convenience explains the explanatory pretense.
This, incidentally, is why I am suspicious of philosophical appeals to
our ordinary explanatory practice, or to the explanatory practices in the
special sciences, to support accounts of what causally explains what (see,

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for example, Burge 1986, 1989, 1993, 1995; Baker 1995). Our explanatory practice is often governed by practical convenience and, sometimes, theoretical ignorance. I know, for example, that we commonsensically invoke beliefs and desires to explain human (and sometimes
animal) behavior. That, I am willing to concede, is the accepted practice.
Even in cognitive psychology and computer science (presumably special
sciences) there are a variety of intentional ideas (e.g., data structures,
information, representation) that regularly appear in causal explanations.
But saying that x's having P causally explains x's Q-ing, when P is a
relational or even worse an intentional property of x, doesn't make
it so. Even if everyone says it. If I trusted explanatory practice this blindly,
I would have to conclude that the monetary value of objects explains
their effect on vending machines. It will take more than our explanatory
practice to convince me of this.
It may be thought that I am constructing a false dichotomy, that the
two explanations of a cashier's or a vending machine's behavior one
in terms of intrinsic S properties, the other in terms of extrinsic V
properties do not (as I have been assuming) really compete. They
aren't mutually exclusive. They can both be correct. The explanation in
terms of a coin's intrinsic properties is a. proximal explanation of its effect
on the vending machine, while the explanation in terms of monetary
value is a more remote explanation of this same result. It is like explaining
a behavioral deficit (stuttering, say) by describing the brain damage that
produces the stutter (explanation by intrinsic properties of the stutterer)
or by mentioning the incident being dropped on the head as an infant
that causally explains this brain damage (an explanation by extrinsic
i.e., historical properties). The first is a proximal, the second a remote,
explanation of the stuttering. Similarly, if we think of the fact that the
paper I give the cashier has a monetary value of $20 - that it has the
kind of history and use that makes it $20 as the causal explanation of
its having the observable properties it now has, then social-historical V
properties causally explain intrinsic S-properties and, thus, explain (in a
more remote way) whatever the S-properties causally explain - why, for
example, the cashier gave me $8 change for my $20.
This objection, although it gets at something interesting about the
connection between extrinsic and intrinsic properties in explanations of
this sort, is not, as it stands, correct. The facts that give coins and bank
notes their value (the V-facts) do not causally explain why these objects
have the size, shape, and markings they have (the S-facts). The reason
why $20 bills have Andrew Jackson's picture on them while $5 bills

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have Abe Lincoln's picture, the reason they have these particular observable features,4 is not that these bills have the value they have. It has to
do, rather, with the various decisions and policies of administrators in
the U.S. Treasury Department. The pictures on U.S. coins and bank
notes might well have been different. If everybody (including the government) agreed, we could, in fact, make $20 bills (the bills that are now
worth $20) into bills worth $5, and vice versa.
Nonetheless, although I think the objection mistaken, it raises an
interesting possibility, the possibility that the explanatory efficacy of an
object's extrinsic properties lies in the complex causal relations between
an object's extrinsic properties and its intrinsic nature. I will return to
this point later in order to explore this possibility. Pending deeper
investigation, though, I assume that the output of people and vending
machines in monetary exchanges is not to be explained, not even remotely, by the extrinsic value of the money that produces that output.
The causal efficacy of money is not explained by its being money.
When externally individuated properties (like V) supervene on intrinsic properties (S), and the supervenient property is multiply realized in S
(thereby making it practically convenient to express generalizations in
terms of V rather than S), talk of the supervenient properties begins to
dominate explanatory contexts and one finds little or no mention of S.5
Imagine trying to explain why Clyde got a Coke not by saying he
deposited the required $0.75, but by describing the S-properties that
were actually causally relevant. If we happen to be ignorant of exactly
which coins Clyde deposited in the machine, the explanation would, of
necessity, be radically disjunctive: fifteen coins of this sort; or two coins
of this sort and seven coins of that sort; and so on and so on. Nobody
gives those kinds of explanations. What does this show? Nothing. Or,
perhaps, only that we are lazy or ignorant.
Despite this undeniable tendency in explanatory practice to drift to
the most conveniently expressible generalizations, V-generalizations are
not the sort that will support explanations. Predictions, yes, but not
explanations. In more careful moments when, for instance, we are
4

I understand, of course, that having X's picture on Y is an extrinsic, not an intrinsic,

property of Y, but I think my point (about differences in observable markings) is clear
enough without going into these fussy details.
5 We advert to S only when the V (and design) stance fails - when, for example, there is a
breakdown or malfunction in the machine: e.g., the machine didn't give us a candy bar
because the coin was bent. See Dennett (1987) for the same point about the intentional
stance.

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doing metaphysics we realize that it is the object's being S, not its

being V, that explains its impact on the system in which it exists. Our
explanatory practice does not respect metaphysical scruples. There is no
reason it should. In giving and receiving explanations we are not doing
metaphysics. We take explanatory shortcuts. We leave the metaphysics
for later. Or never.
That concludes my example. Its intended purpose, of course, is as an
analogy with mindbody interactions. What I hope to do is to draw
some useful lessons from the analogy. For convenience, I will refer to
causal interactions between coins and vending machines as monetarymachine interactions. If we stopped here, if we looked no deeper, then,
despite common explanatory practice, we would have to conclude that,
with respect to machines, money was epiphenomenal. That is, the fact
that money is money does not explain the effects of money on machines
(or people, for that matter). It is the S-facts that do all the explanatory
work. What explains machine behavior are not "broad" facts about the
value of internal coins, but "narrow" facts about their size, shape, and
density. Once we have the analogy fully in place, though, I will return
to the analysis of these interactions and take a deeper look. What I hope
to show is that, contrary to what I have just been arguing, there is a
sense in which monetary facts about money are causally relevant to
machine behavior.6 The form of this relevance is, I think, suggestive
about the way the mind is causally relevant to human and animal
behavior.

2. THE ANALOGY

There is a prevalent view in the philosophy of mind that the propositional attitudes (including belief) are something like internal coins. What
you believe (intend, desire, conclude, regret, etc.) is an extrinsic property
of the internal belief (intention, etc.) in the same way that the value of
coins is extrinsic to the coins in a machine. For a materialist (who is not
an eliminativist) a belief (some brain state, say) has intrinsic (neurobiological) properties, but it also has a content or meaning (= what it is one
believes), and this is determined, in part at least, by the relations this

To machine behavior, not to machine output. This distinction between output and behavior is a distinction that figures importantly in my account of the way reasons explain
behavior in Explaining Behavior (1988). Here I merely note the distinction. I return to it
later.

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internal state bears to external affairs. The relational individuation of

belief is why the same belief can occur in much different heads; what
makes it that belief is not the brain state that realizes it (this can be quite
different), but the way that brain state is related to the rest of the world.
Putnam's (1975) and Burge's (1979) examples have convinced many
that, in this respect, beliefs are "internal money."
I will call this view the Standard Theory. I call it the Standard Theory
not just because it is widely accepted but because, if you are a materialist,7 it is hard to see how something like this view could fail to be true.
Beliefs (just like coins) have to be inside the system whose behavior they
causally explain. How else could they cause the behavior they are said
to explain? Nonetheless, what gives these internal states their content
(just like what gives coins their value) is not inside the head. The
representational (intentional) character of a belief, what makes it a belief
about football rather than philosophy, is a matter of how that internal
state is related to external affairs. Surely there is nothing in the brain that
makes one neurological event about football and another about philosophy. What a person believes its meaning or representational content
must, it seems, be extrinsic to the believer. It is the same with words.
Words and sentences are printed in books, but what makes some words
about football and others about philosophy is not in a book.

3. THE PROBLEM: EPIPHENOMENALISM

The Standard Theory is commonly thought to have the kind of epiphenomenal implications we uncovered in examining monetarymachine
interactions. Although the content of a belief what one believes - is
routinely mentioned in explanations of behavior (just as the value of
coins is mentioned in explanations of machine behavior), this content is,
according to Standard Theory, as irrelevant to what we do as is the
value of coins to what a machine does. If you want to know what makes
vending machines dispense Cokes and candy bars, look to the intrinsic
properties of the internal causes the shape, size, and weight of the
internal coins that trigger its responses. For the same reason, if you want
to know what makes people do the things they do, look not to the
relational properties of belief (those that constitute what we believe) but
to the intrinsic (i.e., neurobiological) properties of the belief Look to
7 And a realist (i.e., not an eliminativist) about the mind.

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the "shape" and "size" that is, the syntax of these internal "coins,"
not their semantics.
This is a form of epiphenomenalism because although beliefs, on this
view, turn out to be causally active (just as the coins deposited in
vending machines are causally active), the properties of the internal cause
that make it mental, the extrinsic properties that give it content (and
thus make it into a belief), are not relevant to the causal efficacy of the
belief. Thus, the Standard View, while denying neither the reality nor
the causal efficacy of the mental, leaves little or no room for understanding the causal efficacy of the mental qua mental. Beliefs, qua beliefs,
have as much effect on the behavior of persons as do quarters, qua
quarters, on the behavior of vending machines.
4. SOLUTIONS
Standard theorists are aware of this problem, of course, and they have
adopted a variety of different strategies to neutralize its impact. Some
(e.g., Campbell 1970; Stich 1978, 1983) simply accept the implication
and try to live with it. Others (e.g., Burge 1986, 1989, 1993, 1995;
Baker 1995) insist that it should be actual explanatory practice, not a
priori metaphysical principles, that determines what is a causally relevant
property. So if, in ordinary causal explanations of behavior, we invoke
what is believed to explain what is done, then what is believed content
is causally relevant to behavior and that is an end to the matter
metaphysical principles to the contrary be hanged. Still others (e.g.,
Fodor 1987) concede the irrelevance of extrinsic or broad content and
look for a satisfactory substitute an intrinsic content, narrow content.
Or, like Davidson (1980), one takes comfort in the fact that beliefs are
causes and refuses to worry about what it is about them that explains
their effects (on Davidson's theory it turns out to be the intrinsic physical
properties of the belief- the ones that figure in strict laws). It is hard to
see why some of these strategies (e.g., Fodor's and Davidson's) for
vindicating the explanatory role of belief are not so much ways of solving
the problem as (like the first) gritty ways of learning to live with (and
talking around) it.
In a series of insightful articles, Jaegwon Kim (1984a, 1984b, 1987,
1989, 1990, 1991, 1993a) has explored the idea that mental causation is
a form of supervenient causation (I denote supervenient causation by
"causation/'). One macroevent (increasing the temperature of a fixed

267

volume of gas, for instance) causes, another macroevent (an increase in

the gas's pressure) in virtue of the fact that both macroproperties
temperature and pressure supervene on causally related microstates of
the gas. Kim offers this as a model for the way mental states cause
behavior: beliefs causally, explain behavior by supervening on "microstates" of the believer (neurophysiological states) that cause bodily
movements. If mental causation is really causations, if the mental really
supervenes on the physical states of the body, then, he says, "mental
causation does take place, but it is reducible to, or explainable by, the
causal processes taking place at a more basic physical level" (1984a,
p. 107) If we assume that mental states supervene on biological states of
the brain, then, Kim suggests (1984a, p. 107), this (i.e., causation) would
redeem the causal powers we attribute to mental states. Mental properties (the content of the propositional attitudes) would be as efficacious
on this account as are temperature, pressure, heat, and a variety of other
physical macroproperties that derive their efficacy from the microevents
on which they supervene.
This account of mental causation is plausible in the case of those
mental states that supervene (or are thought by some philosophers to
supervene8) on the intrinsic (biological) constitution of a person: for
example, pains, itches, tingles, sensations, and feelings. This, no doubt,
is why Kim chose pain and the sensation of fear (1984a, p. 106) to
illustrate the theory.9 For such mental states call them phenomenal
states there is a strong intuition (most philosophers seem to have it)
that physically indiscernible individuals must be in the same phenomenal state. Even if physical twins (as a result of much different histories)
might be having different beliefs, they must (or so the intuition dictates) be having the same sensations (pains, etc.). If this is, indeed, so,
then there is no particular obstacle to supposing that phenomenal states
derive their causal efficacy from the physical states on which they supervene. For phenomenal mental states might who knows? strongly

Not all philosophers think this. Some (including myself see Dretske 1995) have a
representational view of sensations that identifies experienced qualities (qualia) with representational properties. Thus, just like beliefs, the mental properties of sensations turn out to
be extrinsic or relational properties of internal states: see Harman (1990), Lycan (1987,
1997), Tye (1994, 1995).
This is confirmed by his doubts a few pages later (p. 107) about whether the account of
supervenient causation will work for intentional states - states (like belief) that have a
propositional content.

268

supervene10 on the intrinsic physical properties of an individual, and it

is strong supervenience (of the macro on the micro) that Kim requires
(1989, p. 283; 1984a, pp. 104, 106) to support causals relations between
macroevents. Only if the macro supervenes on the micro in the way
temperature supervenes on molecular motion or being water supervenes on being H 2 O is it plausible to attribute the causal efficacy of the
micro to the macro.
But however plausible supervenient causation may be as an account
of the way phenomenal states bring about their effects, it does not seem
to be available as an account of the way intentional states bring about
their effects.11 For intentional states, according to Standard Theory, do
not, like phenomenal mental states, strongly supervene on the intrinsic
biological properties of the person who occupies these states.12 Intentional states, unlike phenomenal states, are relational states of an individual, and it is difficult to see how such relational properties could strongly
supervene on an object's nonrelational, its intrinsic, properties. Our
monetary example illustrates the way, under ideal circumstances (no
counterfeiting), a relational property might weakly supervene on intrinsic
properties: as a matter of fact, thanks to the government's efforts, every
piece of paper that has a particular set of intrinsic properties is a genuine
$20 bill. But weak supervenience is clearly not enough for supervenient
causation. Even though the value of money supervenes on its shape and
size, its being money does not share in the glory of causing what its
having that shape and size causes. Temperature shares (in a derivative
but nonetheless real enough way) in the glory of causing whatever the
events on which it supervenes causes, but the monetary value of a
quarter does not share - not even derivatively in the glory of causing
10 Unlike weak supervenience, strong supervenience requires that anything with a given
base property necessarily has the property that supervenes on it. This requires, as Kirn
notes, some kind of nomological dependence between the supervenient property and those
properties on which it supervenes. If water (in this world) is H 2 O then, if being water
strongly supervenes on being H 2 O, then nothing can be H 2 O without being water.
Contrast this with being a $20 bill. If pieces of paper of this size and shape (in this world)
are $20 bills, this does not imply that things of that size and shape in other possible worlds
are also worth $20 (i.e., are necessarily worth $20).
11 Despite Kim's suggestion (1991) of supervenient causation as a possible replacement for
my own theory (see Dretske 1988). My own theory is explicitly about the explanatory
status of intentional (not phenomenal) states, and, as noted earlier, Kim himself seems
dubious about whether supervenient causation applies to extrinsic mental states (beliefs
and desires).
12 Kim seems to agree with this; see Kim (1987).

269

what the coin's shape and size cause for example, an elliptical shadow
in obliquely falling light. The value (being extrinsic) and the physical
appearance (intrinsic) remain distinct attributes of the coin with different
causal powers. To get supervenient causation we need strong supervenience, but what could it mean to suppose that the monetary value of a
piece of paper or the value of a quarter was necessarily tied up with its
having a particular shape, size, and set of marks? This, it seems, could be
the case only if the monetary value of the paper, its being a genuine $20
bill, was not in fact relational at all but, rather, reducible to the paper's
having just that set of intrinsic properties.13 This, though, is precisely
what Standard Theory denies.
I do not think, therefore, that supervenient causation is a viable
account of the causal powers of extrinsic mental states.14 If what I believe
is a genuine relational property of me, then it might, in some local
way,15 weakly supervene on my intrinsic physical properties, but I do
not see how it can display the kind of dependence on my intrinsic physical
properties that would tempt us to say that it explains whatever the
physical states on which it supervenes explains.
5. A BETTER SOLUTION
We have, however, neglected an important aspect of the causal relations
at work in both monetarymachine and mindbody cases. In the monetarymachine interaction, for instance, there is the fact that the machines on which coins have a causal impact were designed and manufactured to be sensitive to objects having those intrinsic properties (S) on
which monetary value supervenes, and they were made that way precisely because V supervenes on S. Business being what it is, machines that
dispense commodities like cigarettes, food, and drink would not be
designed to yield their contents to objects having S unless objects having
S had V. Remove the fact of supervenience (as a result of widespread

13 Kim (1989) makes exactly this point - the point, namely, that strong supervenience - the
kind necessary for supervenient causation occurs only when there is a possibility of
reduction of the macroproperties to the micro. That is the basis of his argument that
nonreductive materialists should derive no comfort from supervenient causation as a way to
give the mental some causal punch in the material world.
14 Despite his suggestion (1991) that supervenient causation be considered a "modified"
version of my own theory (of belief and desire), I suspect Kim would agree with this.
15 Kim stresses the need to localize the supervenience (the supervenience base for your
thoughts may not be the same as mine) in Kim (1991).

270

counterfeiting, say) and S objects will soon lose their causal power. They
will no longer produce the effects they now produce. They will lose
their causal power because machines will no longer be built to respond
to objects having S. The causal efficacy of intrinsic S (on machines
not to mention people) depends on the supervenience of extrinsic V on
S. Let V supervene on a different set of properties, T, and T-objects
will, quickly enough, assume the causal powers of S-objects.
This additional dimension to the causal story does not show that a
vending machine's output is explained by the monetary value of the
coins deposited in it. No, the Cokes come rolling down the chute not
because an object with a certain value is deposited in the machine, but
because an object with a certain size and shape is. Nonetheless, if what
we want to explain is not why a Coke came sliding down the chute
(the shape and size of the coins deposited will explain that), but why
objects having the size and shape of nickels, dimes, and quarters cause
Cokes to come rolling down the chute, why objects of that sort have
effects of this sort, the answer lies, in part at least, in the fact that there
is a reliable (enough) correlation between objects having that size and
shape and their having a certain monetary value. It lies, in other words,
in the fact that there is a supervenience (weak supervenience) of V on S.
The value doesn't explain why the Cokes come out, but it does explain
why coins objects of that size and shape cause Cokes to come out.
When we turn to the mindbody case, this dimension of the causal
story is suggestive. If we think of ourselves as 'Vending machines"
whose internal causal structure is designed, shaped, and modified not, as
with vending machines, by engineers, but, in the first instance, by
evolution and, in the second, by learning, then we can say that although
it is the "size" and "shape" (the syntax, as it were) of the internal causes
that make the body move the way it does (just as it is the size and shape
of the coins that releases the Cokes) it is, or may be, the fact that a
certain extrinsic property supervenes on that neurological "size" and
"shape" that explains why internal events having these intrinsic properties have the effect on the body that they have. What explains why a
certain neurological event in the visual cortex of a chicken an event
caused by the shadow of an overhead hawk causes the chicken to
cower and hide is the fact that such neurological events have a significant
(to chickens) extrinsic property the property of normally being caused
by predatory hawks. It is, or may be, possession of this extrinsic property
what the internal events indicate about external affairs that explains
why objects having those intrinsic properties cause what they do.

271

There is but a short step from here to the conclusion that it is the
extrinsic, not the intrinsic, properties of internal events that causally
explain behavior. All that is needed to execute this step is the premise
that behavior is not the bodily movements that internal events cause,
but the causing of these movements by internal events. All that is required, that is, is an appropriate distinction between the behavior that
beliefs explain and the bodily movements that (in part) constitute that
behavior. For if moving your arms and legs (behavior) is not the same
as the movements of the arms and legs, but it is, rather, some internal
event causing the arms and legs to move, then although the intrinsic
properties of our internal "coins" will explain (via activation of muscles)
the movements of our arms and legs, the extrinsic properties, properties
having to do with what external conditions these internal events are
correlated with, will explain why we move them.
This is not the place to amplify this account. I tried to do this in
Dretske (1988). The only point I want to make here is that the account
I gave there of how reasons explain behavior depends on a correlation
between the extrinsic (informational) and the intrinsic (biological) properties of reasons. It depends on weak supervenience of the extrinsic on
the intrinsic. Without that supervenience, reasons cannot get their hand
on the steering wheel. This is not because the extrinsic causally, explains
the movements of the body. No. That would require strong supervenience, and the relational properties underlying mental content do not
strongly supervene on neurobiological properties any more than the
value of coins strongly supervenes on their size and shape. It is rather
because supervenience weak supervenience explains why the internal
events that cause the body to move cause it to move the way it does. If
I am right about behavior, that is exactly what we want beliefs to explain
viz., behavior, what a person does.
So to our series of opening questions, the answers are as follows: Yes,
beliefs stand to human behavior in something like the way money stands
to vending machine behavior. Does this show that what we believe is
causally irrelevant to what we do? No, it does not show this any more
than it shows that the fact that nickels, dimes, and quarters have monetary value is irrelevant to the behavior of vending machines. The fact
that these coins have monetary value, the fact that they are a widely
accepted medium of exchange, explains why the machines (are built to)
dispense their contents when objects of this sort are placed in them. In
this sense, the fact that these coins have monetary value explains why

272

machines behave the way they do when the coins are in them. The
same is true of belief: the extrinsic properties of these beliefs what it is
we believe explains why we behave the way we do when these beliefs
occur in us.

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Baker, L. 1995. Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind. Cambridge:

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Burge, T. 1979. Individualism and the Mental. Studies in Metaphysics (Midwest Studies
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Burge, T. 1986. Individualism and Psychology. The Philosophical Review, XCV, No.
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Lycan, W. G. 1987. Consciousness; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/A Bradford Book.
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Stich, S. 1978. Autonomous Psychology and the Belief-Desire Thesis. The Monist,
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Tye, M. 1992. Visual Qualia and Visual Content. Reprinted in Crane 1992.
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274

Index

absolute concepts, 502

acceptance, 86n7, 91nl3
access consciousness, 153n44
action: social character of, 232
acts of awareness: objects vs., 1838
advanced knowledge, 85, 88
agnosia, 141n8
Aldrich, Virgil, xi, 97-8, 100-1, 105,
106nl4, 109-10, llln20, 112n21
Allen, C , 260nl
Alpha/Beta constellations, 125-32, 134
altimeter example, 65-6, 68, 70, 73, 74,
221
analysis of knowledge, 89, 90
animals: and awareness, 181, 185; beliefs in, xii, 70, 86, 87n8, 144; conclusive reasons in, 22; conceptual sophistication of, 69-70; conscious
experiences, 186-8; consciousness,
142-4, 183, 185, 191; knowledge in,
x, 80, 81, 82, 83-4, 85, 86-8, 89, 92,
93; lack of concepts, 142-3 177;
learning in, 204-5, 218; object/fact
awareness, 189; perception of objects
and events, 140; perceptual experiences, 151; thought in, 233, 234;
worth of consciousness to, 182
Antony, Louise, 214
Armstrong, David, xi, 123-4, 146,
148
artifacts, 85-6, 211; functions, 234-5;

indicators and, 203-4; misrepresentation, 214-15

aspectual shape, 212
attitudes: norms independent of, 253
Austin, J. L., 88-9
awareness, 180; confusion between
awareness/the something of which
we are aware, 173; of conscious experiences, 159-60, 165, 177; of experiences, 1745, 177; of facts/of
things, 114-20, 130; (see also fact [/]awareness; object [o]-awareness;
property \p\-awareness); mind of itself, 158-77; modes of, 183; of perceptual experience, 166, 1678, 170
1, 172; of properties, 174
awareness of/awareness that, 139, 140,
142, 144
Bedau, M , 246n6
behavior: beliefs and, 145-6, 236, 237,
238, 239, 267, 272-3; causal explanation, 271-3; caused by mental
states, 268; changed with indicators,
203, 2047; effect of information on,
197, 199; explaining, 259-73; meaning and, 201; perceptual awareness of
facts and, 116; psychological explanations of, 207; social character of
thought and, 240
behaviorism, 103, 112

275

belief, ix, x, xi, 72, 139, 157, 172; in

animals, xii, 70, 86, 87n9, 144; in
awareness of facts, 122, 123; and behavior, 145-6, 236, 237, 238, 239,
267, 272-3; causal efficacy of, 202n5,
204; complex concepts in, 79; concept acquisition and, 77; concept of,
is norm-laden, 248; concepts required for, 175nl7; conscious, 135;
in conscious experience(s), 138; content of, 68, 69, 266; contrast with
knowledge, 64-5, 72-3, 74, 75-8;
difference between experience and,
142; epistemology of, 64-79; in explanatory practice, 263; explanatory
role of, 267; extrinsicness of, 239-40;
information and, 196, 197, 198-9,
201; intentional properties of, 259;
intrinsic features of, 259-60; and
knowledge, 23, 24, 86-7, 90-3; justified, 35, 49, 62, 81; language and,
73-8; learning and, 68-9; perception
and, 140, 141; perception without,
146; relational individuation of, 265
6; reliability of, 64, 68; as representation, 65-8, 266; seeing and, 99, 1001, 102-3, 104, 105, 106-7; theory of,
222; truth/falsity of, 247, 248-9, 253
belief condition on knowledge, 62
belief state(s), unconscious, 147
believing: conclusive reasons for, 23, 24
binding problem, 163n8
biology, norms in, 246-7
birdwatcher example, 54-6, 58, 61-3
blindsighters, 189, 191
Block, Ned, 153n44
bodily sensations, 174
Boghassian, Paul, 248n7
brain: and beliefs, 266; experiences and
thoughts resident in, 254, 255; visual
information processing, 163
brain-damaged adults, knowledge in,
83, 86, 87, 92
Brandon, R., 248n7
Brentano, F., 219
Burge, Tyler, 266, 228nl, 229n3,
231n8, 233nlO

Buster (generic animal) example, 23540

Cartesianism, 138, 233n9
causal connections, 79, 12
causal efficacy: of the mental, 267; of
money, 261, 264, 271; of phenomenal states, 268-9; of thought, 229-30
causal explanations, 262-3; of behavior,
267, 268, 271-3; of beliefs, 266
causal relevance, 267; money-machine
interactions, 261-2, 264, 265
causal theory of perception, 107-9, 111,
112, 149
child learning colors example, 70, 74
child seeing fingers example, 1512,
154, 155-6, 157
children: and awareness, 181; concepts
in, 177; knowledge in, 83, 87, 88,
92; prelinguistic thought in, 233;
perception of objects and events,
140
child's awareness of shape example, 176
7
chimpanzees, 132, 154, 155
Chisholm, Roderick, M , Iln9, 22nl6,
163, 212, 213
cognition(s), 147; norm-laden, 2468,
251, 252
cognitive mechanisms, 104
cognitive psychology, 263
cognitive states, 67; aboutness or intentionality of, 2545 cognitivism/cognitivists, 144-9, 151-2
color, 166nlO; awareness of, 170-1
communication, 227-8; acts of, 196-7,
198-9
compass example, 211-12, 216
concept-charged mental state, 113
concept formation, 236, 238, 239-40
concept-free mental state, 113
conception: perception and, 97, 107
concepts: acquired in learning, 69-71,
72; acquisition of, 73, 74-5, 77-8;
and beliefs, 86; in consciousness of
facts, 116; in consciousness of things,
120; essential to thought, 235; exten-

276

sions of, 249; higher-order mental

state involves, 133; informationprocessing resources and, 78-9; primitive vs. complex, 255nl5; required
for mind's awareness of itself, 1757;
rules governing application of, 249
50, 251
conceptual role semantics, 251
conclusive reasons, 3-29, 58; counterfactual analysis of, 92nl4
concrete objects vs. abstract objects, 117
18
confirmation theory, 34
conscious beings: vs. conscious states,
179-83
conscious experience(s), xi, 113-37,
138, 147, 149-57, 183-5, 186-7;
awareness of, 159-60, 163, 165, 177;
without consciousness of having experience, 114, 121, 125, 128, 129,
132; distinguishing between, 12532;
function of, 187; purpose of, 188
conscious states, 182, 183; conscious
beings vs., 17983; identified with
acts, 188; object of creature awareness, 185; purpose of, 185-6
consciousness, 113-14, 135-6, 138,
140n6, 180; in animals and infants,
142-4; differences in, 123-4, 139; of
facts/of things, 113, 114-20; good of,
178-92; hard problem of, xi, 158-9;
Multiple Drafts model of, 142; role
of, 179; theory of, 115, 137, 142,
143
Consciousness Explained (Dennett), 139,

142, 144, 145, 148, 149n34

content, 207, 214; of beliefs, 266; explanatory and rationalizing role of,
225; independent of truth, 213; naturalistic theories of, 222; normativity
of, 248n7, 249; relevant to behavior,
267; of thought, 223, 224, 225,
229n5
Content and Consciousness (Dennett), 139

contextual relativity, 50
contrast consequences, 38-40, 42-4, 467

Contrasting Set (CS), 56-8, 60

contrastive focusing, 58-9
conversational implicatures, 141
counterfactuals, 92nl4; relevant conditions associated with, Hn9
creature consciousness, 1212, 123,
124, 127, 129, 131, 134, 179, 180,
182, 183; state consciousness and,
184
Damasio, A. R., 174
Danto, Arthur, 22nl5
Darwin, Charles, 219-20
Davidson, Donald, 229n3, 243n2, 252,
267
Davies, M., 178
de re beliefs, 105
Dennett, Daniel, xi, 114, 138-9, 140,
142, 143-4, 145, 147-8, 151, 152;
on conscious experience, 149-50; on
qualia, 153, 155, 156
Descartes, Rene, 64-5, 81, 138, 143,
144, 232
desires, 172; in explanatory practice,
263
discrimination learning, 205
disjunction problem, 214, 219-22
dissociation phenomena, 191
dolphin learning example, 68-9, 73
dreams, 25, 53, 121nl3, 159, 254
Einstein, Albert, 81-2
embedded norms, 244n3
emotions, 172-5
empirically conclusive reasons (ECR),
17, 19
emptiness, 63; as absolute concept, 51,
52,58
epiphenomenalism, 2667
epistemic logic, 34
epistemic operators, 30-47; are
semipenetrating operators, 323, 34,
40
epistemology, 139; of belief, 64-79;
naturalized, ix-x, xi-xii
events, 115; being conscious of, 179

277

evidence, xi, 623, 88, 89; in analysis of

knowledge, 57-58; conclusive, 4
evolutionary theories, 218, 219-20
experience(s), x, ix, 210; awareness of,
174-5, 177; in awareness of things,
122, 123; conclusive reasons in, 20;
conscious differences in, 1301, 132
3, 134; conscious states in, 185; difference between belief and, 142;
function of, 191; intentional, 254; relation with qualia, 156-7; veridical,
253; what makes them conscious,
1326; see also conscious
experience (s)
explanation, 45, 46, 47; effects money
has, 261-2; of human behavior, 266;
of machine behavior, 262-5, 272-3
explanatory practice, 2623, 2645, 267
externalists/externalism, 82, 84, 86n5,
87n8, 90, 91, 92, 93, 158nl
extrinsic properties: of beliefs, 265, 267;
explaining behavior, 271-2, 273; of
money, 260, 261-2, 263-5
extrinsic state(s)/activity(ies), 227;
thought, 229-30, 240
fact (/)-awareness, 119-20, 125, 126,
127, 128, 129-30, 131, 135, 160-5,
166, 167-8, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175,
176; conscious experience does not
require, 133; distinct from thingawareness, 133-4; indirect, 170; object awareness vs., 18891
facts: connection to, xi; consciousness/
awareness of, 113, 114-20, 130, 179;
perception of, 140; seeing, 139, 142;
and truth/falsity, 247
factual knowledge: is absolute, 48-9
feeling(s), 159n2, 172-5
first-person operationalism, 114, 1389
Flanagan, O., 154
flat: as absolute concept, 50, 51, 52
Flat Earth Society, 51
Fodor, Jerry, 112, 200n2, 214, 219,
220, 221, 246n6, 255nl6, 256, 267
French horn example, 181

FrisbyJ. P., 163-4

frog example: representation/misrepresentation, 67-8, 73
fully penetrating operator, 30-2, 34, 35,
37-8
functional states: psychological states
and, 103-4
functional theories, 104-5
functionalism, 145-6
functions: detaching meaning from
cause, 215, 216, 219; of instruments,
215, 216
Gettier, Edmund, 18nl3
Gibson, Eleanor, 131
Goldman, Alvin, 7-8, 9, 10-11
Goodman, Nelson, Iln9
Grice, Paul, 108nl5, 117, 141, 198
grounds, conclusive, 4
hallucinations, 25, 53, 121, 122, 145,
156, 159, 162-3, 165, 167, 168, 254;
about movement, 172
Hamlyn, D. W., 229n3
Hanson, Norwood Russell, 243-4
Harman, Gilbert, 6, 8-9
hearing, 159n2; and conscious experience, 11516, 121; form of consciousness, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185
"Hide the Thimble," 139-42
higher-order acts, 185
higher-order experience, 133
higher-order experience (HOE) theory,
185
higher-order thought (HOT) theories
of consciousness, 114n2, 124, 133,
143nl3, 185-6
history: and intentionality, 252-6; and
mentality, 252; of mind, 242-58; of
money, 260; necessary for misrepresentation, 253nl3; and normativity,
251, 252-3
Horn, G., 144
Hume, David, 246
Humphrey, N., 190-1
Humphreys, G. W., 178

278

illusion, 35, 147, 246

implication vs. implicature, 117
indicators: and artifacts, 203-4; and
learning, 204-7
indirect realism, 167
ineffability, 150, 154-5
infants: consciousness, 1424; knowledge in, 82, 83, 85, 86; seeing nonepistemically, 102
information, ix, x, xi-xii, 82, 195;
causal efficacy of, 198-9, 201, 202,
204, 207; counterfactual analysis of,
92nl4; delivered by sensory systems,
11011; delivery of, in seeing, 111
12; distinct from belief and
judgment, 149n34; from environment, 239; and intentionality, 20913; in knowledge/beliefs, 79, 87-8,
90, 91-2; in learning, 69, 70-2, 73,
77; meaning and, 195-9; provided by
perception, 251-2; putting to work,
195-207; sources of, 60, 92, 93, 1089; see also sensory information
information-carrying function, 215,21617, 218-19, 220, 221-2, 223, 224-5;
of sense organs, 235; of thoughts, 234;
of representations, 234
information pickup and processing capabilities: determine representational
powers, 70, 72, 76-9
inner-sense theory, 133-4
inner spotlight theory of consciousness,
114, 133, 134
instruments, 1489; informationproviding function of, 234; knowledge in, 85; reliability of, 61; representational powers of, 65-7, 70, 215
16
intelligence, 209, 211
intentional action: mind and, 259
intentional acts: subject to norms, 250
1
intentional concepts: are history-laden,
256-7
intentional relations, 254
intentional states: effects of, 269-70

intentionality, 252-7; first mark of, 213;

information and, 209-13; original,
212, 223; teleological theories of, 219;
third mark of, 212
internal states, 172; conscious, 185; correlated with external conditions, 2034, 205-7; and external affairs, 266;
form, shape, or syntax of, 200
internalists/internalism, 82, 83, 84,
86n5, 87n8, 88, 91
intrinsic properties: of beliefs, 265-7;
explaining behavior, 271, 272; intentional states and, 269, 270; of internal
causes, 266; of money, 260-2, 2634, 270-1
introspection, 135, 155
introspective awareness, 123-4, 134
introspective knowledge: psychological
immediacy of, 170
inverted-spectrum problem, 155n49
irrelevant alternatives, 57, 63
Jackson, F., 170-1
judgment(s), xi, 139, 149-50, 151-2,
153, 157, 254nl4; mistaken, 248;
perception and, 140, 141; truth/falsity of, 247
justification, xi, 26, 57, 88-9; implied
threshold of, 49, 50; optimal, 53; required for knowledge, 51; standards
of, 58, 59
justified true belief, 18nl3, 35, 49
Kantian view: concepts in, 248n7
killing (concept), 244, 256
Kim, Jaegwon, 260n2, 267-8, 269,
270nnl3,14,15
Kinsbourne, M , 148
knowledge, ix, x-xi; absolute character
of, 48-51, 52, 53; accounts of, 35;
analysis of, 526; basis of, 56; and
beliefs, 86-7, 90-3, 197; causal account of, 7-8, 42n4; characteristically
human, 83, 84-5; conclusive reasons
in, 4, 18, 20, 21-9; conditions necessary for, 268, 29; connection with

279

knowledge (cont.)
information, 72; contrast with belief,
64-5, 72-3, 74, 75-8; perception
and, 140, 141; possibility of mistake
in, 19; pragmatic, social, or communal dimension to, 52-3, 48-63;
senses of, 834, 85, 88; two conceptions of, 80-93
Knowledge and the Flow of Information

(Dretske), ix
knowledge claims, 25, 46; how we
know in, 60; skeptical objections to,
38-9
Kripke, S., 248n7
language: and belief, 73-8; of entitlements, commitments, rules, and
norms, 251; social character of, 2278, 232-3
learning, 68-73, 104, 224, 242, 271; in
animals, 204-5, 218; causal efficacy
of information and, 207; in cracking
sensory codes, 111; indicators and,
204-7; information in, 77; and informational functions, 235; to perceive,
100; right kind of, 223; and social
character of thought, 235-40
Lehrer, Keith, 18nl3, 82-3, 84, 85,
86nn5,6,7, 87, 88nll, 89-90, 91-2
Levine, Joseph, 214
Loar, Brian, 231-2
Locke, John, 133, 166
logically conclusive reasons (LCR), 17
long-distance truck driver example, 123
4
lottery paradox, 6, 8-9, 14
Lycan, W., 133
MacDonald, G., 253nl3
machines: knowledge in, x, 856;
money and, 259, 260-5, 270-1
Malcolm, Norman, 233n9
materialsm, 112, 170; beliefs in, 265,
266
Matthen, M., 246n6
meaning(s): detached from cause, 214,
215, 216, 219, 221-2; independent

of truth, 213; and information, 1959, 201, 207; nonnatural/natural, 198;

normativity of, 248n7, 249; recipe
for, 214; teleological accounts of, 219
memory, 80, 129, 130nl9, 254nl4
mental (the): causal efficacy of, 267;
constitution of, 24258; normativity
of, 245-52
mental causation, 200n2, 267-9
mental content: Fodor's (Asymmetric
Dependence) theory of, 255nl6
mental representation(s), x, 224; biologically oriented approaches to, 217;
teleology underlying, 219-20
mental states, 158nl, 171: awareness of,
176; concept-free/concept-charged,
113; conscious, 114, 124, 125, 1323, 134-5, 179-80, 186, 188nlO; are
normative, 242-3, 248n7; and perceptual awareness, 172-3, 174, 175;
thing-aware/fact-aware, 1234, 1334; truth and, 248; unconscious, 17980
mentalism, 112
metaknowledge, 85, 88
metaspection, 135
microjudgments, 148, 156, 157
microtakings, 148, 149, 156, 157
Millikan, Ruth, 246, 253nl3
Mill's Method of Difference, 196, 211
Milner, A. D., 189nl2
mind, xi, xii, 138, 139; awareness of itself, 158-77, 171; history of, 242-58;
and intentional action, 259; locating,
158nl; material constitution of, ix;
naturalistic recipes for, 209, 210-11;
recipe for building, 213, 216
mind-body interaction, 259, 265, 270,
271-3
misinformation, 198, 199
misrepresentation, 224, 225, 246, 247;
capacity for, 213-16, 219, 223, 234;
history necessary for, 253nl3; problem of, 219, 2212; representation
and, 65-8, 70, 74
monetary-machine interactions, 259,
260-5, 266, 269, 270-1, 272-3

280

monkeys: thing-awareness/factawareness example, 1312

moods, 172-5
Moore, G. E., 34-5
motivations, 240
movement, 162, 165, 166nlO, 172-3,
203-4; experiences of, 169-70; illusion of, 1634; internal elements as
causes of, 206, 207
Multiple Drafts model of consciousness,
142
murder (concept), 244, 256
narrow content, 229n5, 267
Natsoulas, T., 140n6
natural functions, 216-19, 222, 223
natural selection, 218, 220, 242, 252
naturalism, ix-x, xi-xii, 209, 210
naturalistic accounts of mind: source of
cognitive norms in, 246-7
naturalistic basis for epistemological theory, 80-1
naturalistic theories of representation,
213, 214, 216, 219, 226
Neander, K., 246n6, 253nl3
neuropsychology, 179
nonpenetrating operators, 32, 37, 41
normative concepts, 243-5
normativity, 249, 251
normativity problem, 247
norms, 242-58: source of, 245-52
noticing, 145
Nozick, R., 54, 82
object (o)-awareness, 160-5, 166, 167,
168, 172, 173, 175, 176, 184; vs. fact
awareness, 188-91; vs. acts of awareness, 183-8; being conscious of, 179;
perception of, 140; seeing of, 98, 99,
101, 102, 106, 107, 112, 139, 142
O'Hear, 143
ontogenetic source of natural functions,
217-18, 219, 220, 224
ontological kinds: differences in, 15960
operators, 30, 405; see also epistemic
operators

pains, 1725
Peacocke, Chris, 247, 248n7
penetrating operator, 30-2, 33, 35, 38
perception, ix, x, xi, 80, 90-100, 1401, 182, 206, 254; in animals, 144;
without belief, 146; causal analysis of,
108; in cognitivism, 144, 145; complex causal process, 149; of complex
scenes, 151; and conception, 97, 107;
everyday, 164; function of, 251-2;
nonepistemic, 139-40; of objects and
events/of facts, 140; veridical, 168
perceptual awareness, 150; of facts, 116
17
perceptual belief(s), 188; distinct from
perceptual experience, 113, 124, 131,
152-3; norm-laden, 251-2; perceptual experience assimilated to, 146;
truth of, 253
perceptual consciousness, 140, 147
perceptual experiences, 101, 102, 140,
147-9, 150-2, 165-71, 175, 188,
191, 251-2; assimilated to perceptual
belief, 146; awareness of, 166, 167-8,
170-1, 172; conscious, 158, 159, 172;
distinct from perceptual belief, 113,
124, 131, 152-3; phenomenology of,
164-5
perceptual object(s), 106, 107, 108
perceptual systems, 104, 251; biological
functions of, 252
phenomenal character: of bodily sensations, 174; of experiences, 175; offawareness of experience, 167
phenomenal consciousness, 153n44,
155
phenomenal experience, 153; function
of, 189, 190, 191; nature of, 158-9,
160; of or about things, 172
phenomenal properties, 153, 155
phenomenal states, xi, 2689
phenomenology: of perceptual experience, 164-5
philosophy of mind, x, 64, 140, 145,
265; naturalized, xi-xii
phylogenetic source of natural functions, 217, 218, 219, 220, 224

281

Pitcher, George, 147, 148

potential beliefs, 146-7, 148, 156, 157
pressure gauge example, 901, 923
presuppositions: epistemic operators
and, 37-8, 41-2
Price, H. H., 108
probability theory, 34
processes, 161
properties: being conscious of, 179; of
indicators, 206; universal, 255nl6; see
also extrinsic properties; intrinsic
properties
property (p)-awareness, 158, 159, 1605, 167, 168-70, 171, 172, 173, 174,
175, 176, 184
proposition(s): consequences of, 35; epistemic worth of, 34
propositional attitudes, 172, 173, 265
proprioception, 158n3, 159
proto-thought, 222-3
psychological states: and functional
states, 103-4
pumpkin example, 159, 160, 163, 1656, 167, 168-70, 172, 174
purpose: intentional ingredients for,
210, 211; norms independent of, 253
Putnam, Hilary, 75-6, 104, 229n4, 266
qualia, 154-7, 170, 174, 175, 188, 189;
issue of, 150
"Quining Qualia" (Dennett), 154
rational belief: vs. reliable beilef, 80-93
rational inference, 81
rationality, 223-6
real relations, 254, 255
relationally absolute concepts, 52, 54
reasons, xi; and behavior, xii; conclusive, 4
"Reasons and Consequences" (Dretske), 28n20
recipe: for building internal representations, 219; for mind, 209-10, 211,
212-16; for thought, 213, 214, 215,
216, 222-3, 224-6
reductionism, 255, 256
Relevancy Set (RS), 57-62

relevant alternatives, 44-5, 46, 52, 53,

58-9, 60, 61-2, 63; eliminated, 52,
56
relevant conditions, 92nl4
reliable belief: rational belief vs., 80
93
Reliability Analysis, 108nl7
representation: beliefs as, 65-8, 239; is
intentional, 254nl4; language and,
75, 78; and misrepresentation, 658,
70, 74; theory of, 222; thought as,
233, 234, 235, 240; see also misrepresentation
representational powers: determined by
information-handling resources, 70,
72, 769; limited by informational
pickup and proceessing capabilities,
70
representational systems, dual, 73-4
Rey, Georges, 182n7
Rock, Irvin, 129
Rosenthal, D., 121, 133, 179, 186
rules, 248n7, 249-50
Searlejohn, 212n2
secondary properties, 166nlO
seeing, 97-8, 140-1, 159n2; and beliefs,
98-9, 100-1, 102-3, 104, 105, 1067; in cognitivism, 144, 145; and conscious experience, 115-16, 118, 121;
distinguished from identifying,
142nll; factors in, 109-10; facts/objects, 139, 142; form of consciousness, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185; form
of knowing, 88, 89, 142; nonepistemically, 101-2, 111; and perception, 100; see also simple seeing
Seeing and Knowing (Dretske), xi, 97,
100, 111, 139
seeing-as, 144
self-awareness: prerequisites of, 175-7;
psychological immediacy and epistemically privileged character of, 170,
171
semantic connections, 254-6
semipenetrating operators, 32-3, 34, 35,
37, 38, 40

282

sensations: representational view of,

268n8
sense data, 154, 156
sense-data theories, 1667
Sense-Datum Fallacy, 156, 163
senses, 176; information-providing
function, 217
sensory experience, 112, 124
sensory forms of consciousness, 180
sensory information: coded, 150-3;
processing of, 1223; simple seeing in
gathering and utilizing, 1056, 110
11
sensory phenomena: undestood in cognitive/conceptual terms, 145, 146
sensory systems, 60, 104, 109, 110
sentential operators, 30, 31
shape, 166nlO, 176-7
signal(s): causal efficacy of, 202-3; information carried by, 199, 1001,
202
simple seeing, 97-112; informationtheoretical account of, 109, 111
skeptic(s), x; and absolute comcepts, 51;
and belief/knowledge gap, 65, 79;
and conclusive reasons, 24-6
skeptical arguments: knowledge claims,
38-9, 40, 46; penetrability thesis, 345; pragmatic dimension of knowledge, 53-4, 58, 62
skepticism, xi, 55-6, 81, 85n4
Skinner, B. F., 219
Skyrms, Brian, 18nl3
Sleigh, Robert, 22nl6
smelling, 159n2; and conscious experience, 115-16, 121; form of consciousness, 180-1, 182, 185
social character, 227-8; of language,
232-3; of thought, 228-34, 23540
speckled hen example, 118
speedometer example, 66, 234
spot, consciousness of, example,
126, 127, 128-9, 130, 133, 134
Standard Theory, 266, 267, 269, 270
state consciousness, 121-2, 124, 127,
129, 131, 134, 179-80, 182-4,

188nlO, 191; act conception of, 184;

inner sense version of, 133-4; object
conception of, 186
structuring cause, 238
supervenience: strong 269, 270, 272;
truth and, 199-203; of value, 260-1,
262, 264, 269-71; weak, 260n2, 261,
269, 270, 272
supervenient causation, 267-9,270,2712
suppressed inclinations, 147, 148, 156,
157
Swampman, 243n2, 252, 257
symbols, 235; meaning of, 200
tasting, 159n2; and conscious experience, 121; form of consciousness,
182, 183
teleofunctions, 251, 252
teleological theories of intentionality,
219
teleology, 220-2; natural, 219
testimony, 56
theory-laden concepts, 2434
theory of knowledge, 90, 93
thimble example, 140-1, 142-3, 145-6,
147, 149
thing-awareness, 119-20, 125, 126,
127, 130, 131, 135; distinct from factawareness, 133-4
things: consciousness/awareness of, 113,
114-20, 130; seeing of, 98, 99, 110
thought(s), 172, 173, 183, 209; causal
efficacy of, 229-30; conscious, 186;
conscious states in, 185; externalization of, 230n7; functional role of,
223-6; intentional, 254; intentional
ingredients for, 210, 211; as internal
representations, 234, 235; as maps,
240; nature of, 22741; recipe for,
209, 213, 214, 215, 216, 222-3, 2246; social character of, 228-34, 235,
239, 240
"Time and the Observer" (Dennett and
Kinsbourne), 147-8
Tom's moustache example, 119, 120,
130

283

Treisman, Anne, 142nll

triggering cause, 238
tropes, 162n7
truth/falsity, 251; of beliefs and judgments, 247, 248-9; of information,
197, 198, 199; and supervenience,
199-203; of thoughts, 216, 234
Twin Earth example, 75-8, 229n4
unconscious experiences, 186, 187
Unger, Peter, 24nl8, 50-1
universals, 160, 163

verificationism, 131
visual experience, 111-12, 135, 158n2,
1901; awareness of, 166; properties
of, 169
visual perception, 97, 100; problemsolving approaches to, 81nl
waterfall phenomenon, 163-4
White, A., 114-15, 180
windows in house example, 130nl9
Woodfield, A., 231n8
Wright, Larry, 217

284