## 1. Qualitative Character as Representation



Qualitative properties and phenomenal features of mental states are
each often called "qualia" (singular,
"quale"). In recent philosophy of mind that term has been
used in a number of confusingly different ways. There is a specific,
fairly strict sense that comes to us from C.I. Lewis (1929) by way of
Goodman (1951) (though there is plenty of room for exegetical
disagreement about Lewis' own usage). A quale in this sense is a
qualitative property inhering in a sensory state: the color of an
after-image, or that of a more ordinary patch in one's visual
field; the pitch or volume or timbre of a subjectively heard sound;
the smell of an odor; a particular taste; the perceived texture of an
object encountered by touch. (The term "inhering in" in
the preceding sentence is deliberately vague, and neutral on as many
metaphysical issues as possible. In particular, qualia may be
properties *of* the experiences in which they inhere, or they
may be related to those experiences in some other way.) For reasons
that will become clear, we may call this sense of "qualia"
the "first-order" sense. Notice that it differs from the
broader and vaguer sense defined in the entry on
 qualia
 ("the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our
mental lives"), *and* from the much more heavily laden
sense of Block (1990, 1995, 1996), according to which
"qualia" are by stipulative definition neither functional
nor intentional properties. To avoid further confusion, let us speak
of *sensory qualities*.



A sensory quality can be thought of as the distinctive property of an
apparent phenomenal individual. An "apparent phenomenal
individual" is anything of the sort that Bertrand Russell would
have taken to be a "sense-datum," such as (again) a
colored region of one's visual field, or a heard sound or an
experienced smell. But it is important to see that qualities of this
kind do not presuppose the existence of sense-data or other exotica.
Sensory fields are pervaded by such qualities both in everyday
veridical experience and in less usual cases. In our first-order sense
of the "q"-word, the latter point is the merest common
sense, and to deny it would be to take a very radical position. Of
course philosophers will immediately debate the nature of these
commonsensical qualities and further claims about them, but it is
generally agreed that that they are introspectible,
*apparently* monadic or nonrelational, and describable in
ordinary English words such as "green,"
"loud," and "sweet" (though it may be
questioned whether those words have just the same senses as when they
are applied to physical objects and events).



Sensory qualities pose a serious problem for materialist theories of
the mind. For where, ontologically speaking, are they located? Suppose
Bertie is experiencing a green after-image as a result of seeing a red
flash bulb go off; the greenness of the after-image is the quality.
Actual Russellian sense-data are immaterial individuals; so the
materialist cannot admit that the greenness of the after-image is a
property of an actual sense-datum. Nor is it plausible to suggest that
the greenness is exemplified by anything physical in the brain (if
there is some green physical thing in your brain, you are probably in
big trouble). To sharpen the problem:


1. Bertie is experiencing a green thing.
2. Suppose that there is no physical green thing outside
Bertie's head. But
3. There is no physical green thing inside Bertie's head
either.
4. If it is physical, the green thing is either outside
Bertie's head or inside it. Thus,
5. The green thing is not physical. [1,2,3,4] Thus,
6. Bertie's experience contains a nonphysical thing. [1,5]
Thus,
7. Bertie's experience is not, or not entirely, physical.
[6]



This is a valid deductive argument against materialism, and its
premises are hard to deny.



The modern representational theory of sensory qualities originates
with Hall (1961), Anscombe(1965) and Hintikka (1969); early adherents
include Kraut (1982), Lewis (1983), Lycan (1987, 1996), Harman (1990),
Shoemaker (1994), Tye (1994, 1995, 2003a), Dretske (1995), Clark
(2000), Byrne (2001), Crane (2001, 2003), and Thau (2002). The
representational theory is usually (though not always) an attempt to
resolve the foregoing dilemma compatibly with materialism. According
to the theory, sensory qualities are actually intentional contents,
represented properties of represented objects. Suppose Ludwig is
seeing a real tomato in good light, and naturally it looks red to him;
there is a corresponding red patch in his visual field. He is visually
representing the actual redness of the tomato, and the redness of the
"patch" is just the redness of the tomato itself. But
suppose George Edward is hallucinating a similar tomato, and there is
a tomato-shaped red patch in his visual field just as there is in
Ludwig's. George Edward too is representing the redness of an
external, physical tomato. It is just that in his case the tomato is
not real; it and its redness are nonactual intentional contents. But
the redness is still the redness of the illusory tomato. (Note that
the representation going on here is good old first-order
representation of environmental features, not higher-order as in the
"higher-order representation" theories of awareness.)



What about Bertie's green after-image? On the
representationalist (sometimes "intentionalist") analysis,
for Bertie to experience the green after-image is for Bertie to be
visually representing a green blob located at such-and-such a spot in
the room. Since in reality there is no green blob in the room with
Bertie, his visual experience is unveridical; after-images are
illusions. The sensory quality, the greenness of the blob, is (like
the blob itself) a nonactual intentional content. Of course, in cases
of veridical perception, the color and the colored object are not
*merely* intentional contents, because they actually exist, but
they are still intentional objects, representata.



And that is how the representationalist resolves our dilemma. As P1
has it, there is a green thing that Bertie is experiencing, but it is
not an actual thing. That "there is" is the same lenient
non-actualist "there is" that occurs in "There is
something that Bertie believes in but that doesn't exist"
and in "There is at least one mythical god that the Greeks
worshipped but that no one worships anymore." (In defending his
sense-data, Russell mistook a nonactual material thing for an actual
immaterial thing.) Thus, P5, understood as delivering an
*actual* green entity, does not follow.



A slightly surprising but harmless consequence of the representational
view as formulated here is that sensory qualities
("qualia" in our strict first-order sense) are not
themselves properties *of* the experiences that present them:
Sensory qualities are represented properties of represented objects,
and so they are only intentionally present in experiences. The
relevant properties *of* the experiences are, representing this
quality or that. Of course, one could shift the meaning slightly and
speak of "qualia" as properties of experiences,
identifying them with representational features, such as the feature
of representing this strict-sense sensory quality or that; nothing
much hangs on this terminological choice. (As before, "what
it's like" properties are something else again.)



Most representationalists agree that the perceptual representation of
color and other sensible properties is "nonconceptual" in
some sense--at least in that the qualitative representations need
not be easily translatable into the subject's natural language.
Of course, some psychosemantics would be needed to explain what it is
in virtue of which a brain item represents greenness in particular.
Dretske (1995) offers one, as does Tye (1995); both accounts are
teleologized versions of "indicator" semantics.


## 2. Varieties of Representationalism



The mere representation of redness does not suffice for
something's looking red to a subject, much less for a sensory
quality of red and still less for a phenomenal "something it is
like" to experience that quality. One could say the word
"red" aloud, or semaphore it from a cliff, or send it in
Morse code, or write the French word "rouge" on a
blackboard, or point to a color chip. The representation must be
specifically a visual representation, produced by either a normal
human visual system or by something functionally like one. Similar
points would be made for nonvisual qualities, such as subjective
bitterness, which would require alluding to the gustatory system.



Thus, the representational theory of sensory qualities cannot be
purely representational, but must appeal to some further factor, to
distinguish visual representations from other sorts of representations
of redness. Dretske (1995) cites only the fact that visual
representation is sensory and what he calls "systemic."
Tye (1995) requires that the representation be nonconceptual and
"poised," though he also argues that visual
representations of color would differ from other sorts of
representations in being accompanied by further representational
differences. Lycan (1996) appeals to functional role.


### 2.1 Pure, Strong, and Weak Representationalism



Thus we may distinguish different grades of representationalism about
sensory qualities.



*Pure* representationalism would be the view that
representation alone suffices for a sensory quality. But no one holds
that view, for the reason just given: representation alone is cheap
and ubiquitous. (Lloyd (1991) and Thau (2002) perhaps come close; Thau
suggests that representing a certain special sort of content does
suffice for a sensory quality.)



*Strong* representationalism (defended by Dretske, Tye and
Lycan) is the view that representation *of a certain kind*
suffices for a sensory quality, where the kind can be specified in
functionalist or other familiar materialist terms, without recourse to
properties of any ontologically "new" sort. (A mixed
representational-functional view is what Block (1996) calls
"quasi-representationism.") We might further contrast (a)
theories that appeal to functional considerations only to separate
sensory qualities from other represented properties with (b) theories
that use functional considerations more ambitiously, to distinguish
qualitatively different experiences that have the same intentional
content.



*Weak* representationalism says only that qualitative states
necessarily have representational content, which admission is
compatible with sensory qualities also necessarily involving features
that are ontologically "new" (Block (1990, 1996), Chalmers
(1996)). Weak representationalism has been fairly uncontroversial
(though it would have been denied by Russell, who showed no sign of
thinking that his sense-data represented anything, and by behaviorists
and Wittgensteinians who are hostile to the whole idea of mental
representation). At the very least, one who rejects it must try to
explain why we distinguish between veridical and unveridical
experiences; but more recently new opponents such as Campbell (2002),
Travis (2004), Noe (2005), Brewer (2006), and Fish (2009) have
attempted just that.



Throughout the rest of this entry, unless otherwise noted,
"representationalism" shall mean the strong
representationalist view. The mixed sort of account that Block calls
"quasi-representationism" is a version of strong
representationalism, since it does rule out qualitative features that
are both nonintentional and nonfunctional.



Also, we shall consider strong representationalism as applying to all
sensory states, including bodily sensations as well as visual and
other perceptions. Weak representationalism is somewhat controversial
for pains, itches and other sensations, since it is not obvious that
such sensations represent anything at all. Accordingly, strong
representationalism will be all the less defensible for them.



There are further issues that divide strong representationalists,
generating different versions of the view. One is the question, of
whether sensory qualities themselves, in our very specific sense,
exhaust all of what has usually been thought of as a sensory
state's overall phenomenal character. Dretske and Tye maintain
that they do; Lycan (1998) and others argue that they do not. This
matter will be discussed below, in the context of what is called the
"transparency" thesis.


### 2.2 Narrow and Wide Representationalism



A more important division is that of "narrow" vs.
"wide." In the literature on propositional attitudes
beginning with Putnam (1975), the representational content of an
attitude is generally thought to be "wide" in that it does
not supervene on the contents of the subject's head; on this
view, two molecularly indistinguishable people could have different
belief or desire contents, determined in part by objects in their
respective environments. Since according to the representational
theory, sensory qualities themselves are real or unreal environmental
properties, the theory suggests that the qualities too are wide, and
molecularly identical subjects could experience different qualities.
Dretske (1996) and Lycan (1996, 2001) have explicitly defended this
"phenomenal externalism," though in our present
terminology it should be called "qualitative" externalism.
Some other representationalists reject this idea and believe sensory
qualities to be narrow, necessarily shared by molecular duplicates.
Shoemaker (1994), Horgan (2000), Kriegel (2002b), Levine (2003) and
Chalmers (2004) defend narrow representationalism. (Rey (1998) calls
his view "a narrow representationalist account of qualitative
experience," but it is not an account of sensory qualities in
the present sense; if anything Rey favors the elimination of those
qualities.) For some arguments on each side, see Section 4.6.


### 2.3 Representational Contents



Within wide representationalism or within narrow, there may be
disagreement about what kinds of properties are represented. In the
previous section, it was assumed that the putative representata are
environmental features such as the colors of physical objects. But
others have been suggested (Byrne (2001), Levine (2003)): e.g.,
perceptual experience might instead represent sense-data, or
nonexistent colorish properties that physical objects do not really
have. Shoemaker (1994) defends the view that a color experience
represents a dispositional property, viz., the disposition to cause an
experience of just that type. (Kriegel (2002b) and Levine (2003)
defend versions of Shoemaker's view in order to keep sensory
qualities narrow and to handle various inversion cases.) On one
interpretation at least, Thau (2002) posits a special sort of
quasi-color property, distinct from but related to actual colors.



Notice that even on the straightforward view that the representata are
the ostensible colors of physical objects, the representational theory
does not presuppose color realism. It is true that we have been using
color words such as "green" to mean public properties of
physical objects, and one could not (without circularity) explicate
phenomenal greenness in terms of represented real-world public color
and then turn around and construe the latter real physical greenness
as a mere disposition to produce sensations of phenomenal greenness,
or in any other way that presupposed phenomenal greenness. But one may
hold an error theory of physical color, taking the colors of physical
objects to be ultimately illusory, and yet maintain that physical
color concepts are explanatorily and/or conceptually prior to
phenomenal ones.



(There can be more general issues, in other sense modalities, of
identifying the relevant worldly representata. E.g., Gray (2003)
argues that sensations of heat represent neither heat, nor
temperature, nor conductivity, nor energy.)



Chalmers (2004) calls attention to the distinction between Russellian
contents and Fregean contents. The former can be a singular
proposition or a configuration of objects and their properties. Though
the proposition may be believed (etc.) under a mode of presentation,
the mode of presentation is not part of the content itself. By
contrast, a Fregean content includes the mode of presentation, and
does not include individual objects themselves. Representationalists
have most often thought in Russellian terms about perceptual contents,
but Chalmers argues that the content of a perceptual experience is
Fregean. Because it neglects the objects themselves, the Fregean
option would lend itself to a narrow representationalist account, if
such is wanted; also, it helps to accommodate inversion examples
(Section 4.4).


### 2.4 Reductive vs. Nonreductive



As Crane (2003) and Chalmers (2004) have pointed out,
representationalism need not be reductive. One might agree with the
strong representationalist that sensory qualities are identical with
intentional contents, but also contend that the latter intentional
content properties cannot be characterized without reference to
sensory qualities, so despite the identity there cannot be reduction
without circularity. Maintaining in this vein that
"qualia" require a special phenomenal manner of
representation and holding that that manner cannot be reduced to the
functional, Chalmers defends a nonreductive representationalism.
Representationalists who sympathize with the view (of, e.g., Searle
(1990) and Siewert (1998)) that intentionality requires consciousness
would also be motivated to remain nonreductive. Levine (2003) argues
that Shoemaker's (1994) view is nonreductive, on the grounds
that it explicates the qualitative character of an experience in terms
of representing a property that is in turn characterized in terms of
experiences having that qualitative character (Levine does not
consider the apparent circularity vicious). But many other
representationalists are motivated by materialism and by the desire to
reduce sensory qualities to intentionality, holding that
intentionality is the more materialistically tractable of the two.


## 3. Arguments in Favor of the Representational Theory of Sensory Qualities



There are at least four direct arguments in favor of the
representational theory.


### 3.1 The Argument from Materialism



Many representationalists hold that the theory not only preserves
materialism while accommodating sensory qualities, but is the only
very promising way of doing so. For the only viable alternative
resolution of our Bertie dilemma seems to be belief in actual
Russellian sense-data or at least in immaterial properties. The
anti-materialist may not mind sense-data ontologically, but s/he will
also inherit the nasty epistemological problems that Russell never
succeeded in overcoming: If sensory experience presents us with
sense-data and nothing but, the sense-data wall us off from whatever
may be the rest of reality, and we are left with a justificatory gap
between our beliefs about sense-data and our beliefs about the
external world.



More likely, an opponent will hold the line at property dualism, as do
Jackson (1982) and Chalmers (1996). That is quite bad enough for the
materialist, but of course one who holds no brief for materialism in
the first place will not be convinced by the present argument.



There are still nonrepresentationalist alternatives. For example, a
materialist might suggest a type-identity of Bertie's phenomenal
greenness with something neurophysiological, but it is not plausible
to think that a smoothly and monadically green patch in one's
visual field *just is* a neural state or event in one's
brain. At best, the type-identity theorist would have to do away with
the important claim that greenness itself, rather than some surrogate
property, figures in Bertie's experience; the suggestion would
be an error theory, and would have to explain away the intuition that,
whatever the ultimate ontology, Bertie really is experiencing an
instance of greenness.



Two further alternate materialist treatments of sensory qualities are
an "adverbial" theory of the sort recommended by Chisholm
(1957) and Sellars (1967), and outright eliminativism.



According to the adverbial theory, Bertie's experience involves
no thing, either actual or nonactual, that is green. Rather, Bertie
senses green*ly*, greenly-sensing being just a type of visual
sensing. Our main question, "Where, ontologically, is the green
thing?," thus has a false presupposition and there is no
problem. Adverbialism dominated materialists' thinking for so
long that the latter question was hardly ever raised. But (as was not
often noticed), adverbialism is a semantical thesis about the logical
forms of sensation statements, and as such it has been severely and
tellingly criticized, e.g., by Jackson (1977), Butchvarov (1980) and
Lycan (1987).



Eliminativism about sensory qualities is suggested if not championed
by Dennett (1991) and by Rey (1983, 1998). But if Bertie or anyone
else says, "I am visually experiencing greenness," it is
hard either to call that person a liar or to explain how s/he could be
subject to so massive a delusion. (Levine (2001) discusses
eliminativism at more length.)



Dretske (1996) maintains that there is nothing intrinsic to the brain
that constitutes the difference between a red quality and a green one.
Unless there are Russellian sense-data or at least immaterial
properties, what distinguishes the two qualities must be relational,
and the only obvious candidate is, *representing* red or green.
But as before, if one has no objection to sense-data or immaterial
properties, one will be unmoved. The neurophysiological type-identity
theorist would protest here too, though the same rejoinders apply. A
less commissive objection is that, contra Dretske, there are candidate
relations besides that of representing: some wide functional relation,
perhaps, or a typical-cause relation (where neither of these is itself
taken to constitute representing).


### 3.2. The Argument from Veridicality



We distinguish between veridical and nonveridical visual experiences.
How so? It is fairly uncontentious that Bertie's experience is
as of a green blob and has greenness as an intentional object, and
that what the experience reports is false. That is hard to dispute. If
one instead accepts Russellian sense-data, and thinks of the
after-image itself as an actually and independently existing
individual--indeed one of the world's basic building
blocks--one then need not also think of it as representational.
But one will then have to give an oblique account of the notion of
veridicality. If one joins Campbell (2002) et al. in rejecting
perceptual representation entirely, one will still have to reconstruct
veridicality in some ad hoc way.



The representationalist further argues that the experience's
veridicality condition, i.e., there being a green blob where there
seems to Bertie to be one, seems to exhaust not only its
representational content but its qualitative content. Once the
*greenness* has already been accounted for, what qualitative
content is left?



Since weak representationalism does not entail strong, opponents may
offer serious nonrhetorical answers to the argument's concluding
rhetorical question. For example, Block (1996) maintains that Bertie
could introspect a certain qualitative property in addition to the
greenness of the after-image. And we shall definitely encounter a
further kind of content in Section 4.5 below, that may or may not be
the same sort of property Block has in mind.


### 3.3 The Argument from Transparency



Harman (1990) offers the transparency argument: We normally "see
right through" perceptual states to external objects and do not
even notice that we are *in* perceptual states; the properties
we are aware of in perception are attributed to the objects perceived.
"Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic
features of your visual experience. I predict you will find that the
only features there to turn your attention to will be features of the
presented tree, including relational features of the tree 'from
here'" (p. 39). Tye (1995) and Crane (2003) extend this
argument to bodily sensations such as pain.



The transparency argument can be extended also to the purely
hallucinatory case. Suppose you are looking at a real, richly red
tomato in good light. Suppose also that you then hallucinate a second,
identical tomato to the right of the real one. (You may be aware that
the second tomato is not real.) Phenomenally, the relevant two sectors
of your visual field are just the same; the appearances are just the
same in structure. The redness involved in the second-tomato
appearance is exactly the same property as is involved in the first.
But if we agree that the redness perceived in the real tomato is just
the redness of the tomato itself, then the redness perceived in the
hallucinated tomato--the red quality involved in the
second-tomato appearance--is just the redness of the hallucinated
tomato itself.



The appeal to transparency makes it immensely plausible that visual
experience represents external objects and their apparent properties.
But as noted above, that weak representationalist thesis is not
terribly controversial. What the transparency argument as it stands
does not show, but only claims, is that experience has no other
properties that pose problems for materialism. The argument needs to
be filled out, and typically is filled out by a further appeal to
introspection. The obvious additional premises are: (i) If a
perceptual state has relevant mental properties in addition to its
representational properties, they are introspectible. But (ii) not
even the most determined introspection ever reveals any such
additional properties.



(ii) is the transparency thesis proper. (Kind (2003) calls it
"strong transparency" and usefully distinguishes it from
weaker claims, such as that we are very hard put to introspect
additional properties or that we only rarely or abnormally do.)
Transparency is vigorously defended by Tye (1995, 2002) and by Crane
(2003). Dretske (2003) endorses a radical version of it: that we
cannot introspect anything about a perceptual experience, if
"introspect" has its usual meaning of internally attending
to the experience.



Objections to the transparency thesis typically take the form of
counterexamples, mental features of our experiences that can be
introspected but allegedly are nonrepresentational. Harman (1990) and
Block (1996) speak of "mental paint," alluding to
introspectible intrinsic features of a perceptual representation in
virtue of which it represents what it does. Harman precisely denies
the existence of mental paint, but Block holds that, in particular, he
can introspect the nonintentional, nonfunctional items that he calls
"qualia" in a sense quite different from that of sensory
qualities. Loar (2003) grants that vision is normally transparent, but
argues that we can therapeutically adopt what he calls the
"perspective of oblique reflection," perform a certain
imaginative exercise, and thereby come to detect "qualia"
in something like Block's heavily laden sense of that term.



Block further mentions bodily sensations and moods whose
representational contents are minimal but which are vividly
introspectible. Lycan (1998) argues on similar grounds that the
qualities inhering in a sensory experience are only part of that
experience's "overall feel" or phenomenal character
in sense (4). Kriegel (2017) adds that, in particular, sensory
experiences have affective components that are part of the mode or
manner of representing rather than of the representatum.



Turning back to perception, Block notes that if one's vision is
blurry, one can introspect the blurriness as well as the visual
representata. (More on blurriness in Section 4.5.2 below.) The point
may also be made that the vividness of a perception, say of color, can
be introspected over and above the sensed content, but Bourget (2017b)
offers to explain vividness in terms of representata.



A more straightforward objection to transparency is that in perceptual
experience, we can introspect the relevant sense modality in addition
to the content, i.e., whether the representatum is sensed visually,
aurally, olfactorily, or whatever. It may be claimed, as by Lycan
(1996), that those differences are functional only. However, Tye
(2002) has maintained that they can be captured in terms of
representational contents. Moreover, Bourget (2017a) argues in some
detail that only by individuating the sense modalities in terms of
contents can we give the best account of "multimodal" or
multi-sensory experiences, ones which unify distinct sub-experiences
occurring in different modalities, such as those of drinking a cup of
coffee or encountering a barking dog. (Related arguments had been made
by Tye (2007) and Speaks (2015).)



Finally, it would seem that for any sensory quality, one can
introspect the higher-order property of what it is like to experience
that quality (cf. notion (4) listed in the fourth paragraph of this
entry). Indeed, doing that seems to be one of introspection's
standard tasks.



These apparent counterexamples take a lot of overcoming. Tye (2003a)
addresses some of them, arguing in each case that what appears to be a
nonrepresentational difference between two experiences is actually a
difference in representata.



As representationalism has been defined here, it does not require the
transparency thesis. Representationalism itself is a claim only about
sensory qualities, while transparency is about features of experience
more generally. Even if transparency fails and there are
introspectible nonrepresentational features of experiences, those
features are presumably not sensory qualities. (Though some of the
foregoing examples have also been used against representationalism;
see Section 4.) Of course, if representationalism should be construed
as applying to features of experience more broadly, then the existence
of some such features may be troublesome for the view so construed;
but they may be acceptable to the materialist, e.g., because they are
functional.


### 3.4 The Argument from Seeming



Byrne (2001) and Thau (2002) appeal to the notion of the way the world
seems to a subject. Very briefly, as Byrne puts it: "if the way
the world seems to him hasn't changed, then it can't be
that the phenomenal character of his experience *has*
changed" (p. 207), where by "phenomenal character"
in the context Byrne means sensory qualities. Suppose a subject has
two consecutive experiences that differ in qualitative character. If
she is "competent" in the sense of having no cognitive
shortcomings (in particular, her memory is in good working order) and
is slightly idealized in one or two other ways, she will notice the
change in qualitative character. If so, Byrne argues, the way things
seems to her when she has the second experience must differ from the
way they seemed to her while she was having the first. For suppose
that consecutive experiences are the same in content. Then the world
seems exactly the same to the subject during both. She "has no
basis for" noticing a change in qualitative character either,
and by the previous premise it follows that there was no change in
qualitative character (p. 211). The argument generalizes in each of
several natural ways, and Byrne concludes that experiences cannot
differ in qualitative character without differing in representational
content.



If this sounds too close to being another simple appeal to
transparency--and/or to beg the question against mental
paint--Byrne hastens to add that his argument does not require
transparency and is compatible with the existence of mental paint (pp.
212-13). So far as a subject is aware of mental paint, her
experience is "partly reflexive" and represents its own
paint. Therefore, a difference in paint would be another difference in
representatum, not a qualitative difference unaccompanied by a content
difference.



From the orthodox representationalist point of view, that may seem a
dangerous concession. Byrne does hew to the
representationalist's line of supervenience (no qualitative
difference without an intentional difference), but if his argument
does not rule out mental paint, an anti-representationalist may
construct inversion cases such as that of Block's (1990)
"Inverted Earth" (see Section 4.4 below), and argue that
the paint is a nonfunctional intrinsic mental feature of the
experience given in introspection, which is close enough to a
"quale" in Block's special sense, even if the
feature does happen to be reflexively represented by the experience
itself.



An anti-representationalist might also complain that Byrne has
equivocated on "seems." Block (1996) argued that
"looks" (as in "That thing looks red to me")
is ambiguous, as between an intentional or representational sense and
a separable phenomenal sense, and he believes inversion cases show
that the two sorts of looking can come apart. No doubt he would hold
the same of "seems." Whether or not one is persuaded of
that claim, Byrne's argument presupposes that it is false. While
doing that does not strictly beg the question, the argument does help
itself to an assumption that is unlikely to be granted by the
anti-representationalist.


### 3.5 The Argument from Hallucination



Pautz (2007, 2010) appeals to hallucinatory experience. Suppose you
hallucinate (simultaneously) a red ellipse, an orange circle, and a
green square, without ever previously having encountered any of those
colors or shapes. That experience directly gives you the capacity to
form beliefs about the external world, e.g., that there is a red
ellipse, that red is more like orange than like green, and that
ellipses are more like circles than like squares. This
"grounding property" of the experience motivates a
"relational" view of it, according to which having the
experience puts the subject in a relation to "items involving
properties which, if they are properties of anything at all, are
properties of extended objects" (2007, p. 524). Pautz offers two
further arguments for relationality, based respectively on the
"matching property" and the "characterization
property."



Given relationality, representationalism still has three rivals:
sense-data, Peacocke's (2008) "sensationalist"
theory, and Alston's (1999) "theory of appearing."
But each of the rivals succumbs to objections; so representationalism
is true of hallucinatory experience. Now, why not extend
representationalism to experience across the board? At this point
there is just one still unrefuted opponent: the "positive"
disjunctivist who maintains that veridical experience differs
radically in kind from hallucination. Pautz argues that that view is
not worth the complications it enforces.



It remains to show that an experience's characteristic
qualitative properties can be identified with its representational
properties. At this point Pautz appeals to the assumption that for any
qualitative difference between two visual experiences, the difference
has a spatial component, either in distinguishing two subregions of
one's visual field or in attending to one rather than another.
In no case, Pautz maintains, is there going to be an experiential
difference without a representational difference.



Since Pautz has proceeded by objecting to various competing views, we
must hear what their respective proponents will say in rebuttal.


### 3.6 Awareness of sensory qualities



The discussion in this past section and in the next focus on the
nature of sensory qualities themselves. According to the
representationalist, the qualities are not mental; the corresponding
mental property of a sensory state is that of *representing*
the relevant quality. Of course, it is sensory states and experiences
themselves that interest philosophers of mind, and some critics of
representationalism will protest that merely representing a quality
cannot be all there is to having the qualitative character that needs
explaining; we shall return to that complaint in section 4.2
below.



As yet we have said nothing about what it is to be *aware of* a
quality.



If a sensory quality is an intentional object of a mental state, then
presumably the state's owner is aware of the quality in whatever
way a person is aware of the intentional contents of her/his mental
states generally, including those of nonsensory propositional
attitudes. The general issue is problematic and is much discussed in
the "self-knowledge" literature. There are various
options: higher-order representation; self-representation; attentional
modulation; "acquaintance" of some sort more intimate than
any of the foregoing; or the automatic replication of a first-order
state's content in any other state directed upon the first. In
any case, however, the problems of awareness of content are already
with us, and do not afflict the representational theory of sensory
qualities in particular.


## 4. Objections to the Representational Theory



The (strong) representational theory entails the obvious supervenience
claim: that there can be no difference in sensory qualities without a
representational difference. Objections to the theory have most often
come in the form of counterexamples to that thesis. But we shall begin
with four more general complaints.


### 4.1 Objections to the Nonactual



Some philosophers are squeamish about the representationalist's
commitment to nonactual objects in cases of hallucination or
perceptual illusion. For example, Loar (2003) imagines comparing the
experience of seeing a lemon and a subjectively indistinguishable case
of hallucinating an exactly similar lemon. "A way of putting
this is representational: the two experiences present the real lemon
and a merely intentional object as exactly similar, and that is what
makes the experiences indistinguishable.... At the same time, one
has a good sense of reality, and so wants to hold that the merely
intentional lemon is nothing at all, and so not something that can
resemble something else" (p. 84). A similar sentiment is
sympathetically attributed to Fred Dretske by Levine (2003, p. 59n).
The representational theory is sometimes assimilated to Alexius
Meinong's fanciful view that along with the many things that
actually exist, there are plenty of other things that are like the
things that exist except for happening to lack the property of
existing. (Thus, Mage exists but does not have wings; Pegasus lacked
existence but had wings.)



But it is important to see that the metaphysics of nonexistence is
everyone's problem, not peculiarly that of the
representationalist (or of one's current opponent on whatever
issue in the philosophy of mind). There are things that do not exist,
such as a hallucinated pink rat or a hallucinated lemon. However
troublesome it is for fundamental ontology, that fact does not entail
Meinong's exegesis of it, or David Lewis' concretist
interpretation, or any other particular metaphysical account of it.
The representational theory of sensory qualities is neutral on such
underlying issues; it says only that when you hallucinate a lemon, the
yellowness you experience is that of the lemon. Of course, neither the
lemon nor its color actually exists, but as before, there are plenty
of things that do not exist. (And one should question whether, as Loar
maintains, nonactual things and people cannot resemble actual
ones.)


### 4.2 Unconscious Representation



Sturgeon (2000), Kriegel (2002a) and Chalmers (2004) argue that
representation cannot suffice for a sensory quality (or for there
being something it is like for the subject to do the representing, but
that is not our topic for now), because representation can occur
unconsciously. This appears to refute pure representationalism, since
according to that view representation of the relevant sort of property
does necessarily constitute a sensory quality. The point is not highly
significant, since as before, pure representationalism is an
unoccupied position. The real question is, whether the concern behind
this objection carries over to "quasi-" or other strong
representationalism.



Sturgeon does seem to hold the stronger view that not even
representation of whatever special sort is appealed to by the
quasi-representationalist can suffice for a sensory quality, because
any such representation can occur unconsciously. Since the
quasi-representationalist maintains precisely that a sensory quality
is simply a representatum of the relevant sort, this would be an
outright refutation.



This objection rests on the crucial assumption that sensory qualities
can occur only consciously. That assumption shares the usual multiple
ambiguity of "conscious." The interpretation on which the
objection's premise is most obviously true is that of sense (1)
or sense (2) above: Representation can occur without its
subject's being aware of it, and/or without the subject's
introspecting it. But if we then understand the tacit assumption in
the same way, it would be independently rejected by most
representationalists, who already hold that a sensory quality can
occur without being noticed by its host. (Consider the driver driving
"on autopilot" who obviously saw the red light, and saw
its redness in particular, but who was daydreaming and quite unaware
of the redness, or even of applying the brake.) If, rather, sense (3)
is intended, the assumption would be fine, because tautologous (a
quality cannot occur without a quality occurring); but the
objection's premise would be, in effect, a flat and
question-begging denial of strong representationalism, saying that the
relevant representation can occur without a sensory quality
occurring.



What of sense (4)? Here the objection gets a slightly better foothold.
The premise is true; representation can occur without there being
something that representing is like for the subject. And there is at
least a sense of the phrase "what it's like" in
which the tacit assumption is true also: Recall that some theorists
have used that phrase simply to mean a sensory quality (in sense (3));
so again the assumption would be tautologous. But the present concern
is for sense (4), and at this point the objection breaks down. For so
far as has been shown, a (first-order) quality can occur without there
being anything it is like for the subject to experience that quality
on that occasion; the subject may be entirely unaware of it.



In virtue of what, then, does an experience contain, or have inhering
within it, a sensory quality? The representationalist's answer
is, in virtue of representing that quality in a distinctive way. What
are distinctive about that mode of representation are (a) the
functional considerations needed to specify the relevant sense
modality, and (b) assuming "experience" implies
*awareness of* the sensory quality, whatever is called for by
one's account of awareness-of.


### 4.3 "Phenomenal Intentionality"



Terry Horgan and co-authors, beginning with Horgan (2000) and Horgan
and Tienson (2002), inaugurated the "Phenomenal Intentionality
Research Program." (The view was anticipated by Siewert (1998),
and see, e.g., the essays collected in Kriegel (2013), as well as
Mendelovici (2018).) It was inspired in part by an idea of
Loar's (1987, 2003), but its approach is different and its
claims are much more ambitious. Its proponents defend an internal,
narrow type of intentionality that (Horgan and Tienson say) is not
only determined by phenomenology but is *constituted* by it
(pp. 520, 524); indeed, they contend (p. 529) that their internal
intentionality is "the *fundamental* kind of
intentionality: the narrow, phenomenal kind that is a prerequisite for
wide content and wide truth conditions." And by
"phenomenal," they seem to mean "what it's
like" properties in the higher-order sense.



This would imply that "what it's like" properties
are conceptually or at least metaphysically prior to intentionality.
Put together with representationalism about sensory qualities, it
would follow that "what it's like" properties are
prior to those, which is quite contrary to the spirit of (though not
flatly incompatible with) representationalism, and certainly it poses
a general threat of circularity. Moreover, some proponents concede
that it is anti-naturalistic and may require a departure from
materialism; but Mendelovici and Bourget (2014) argue that
naturalistic considerations actually *favor* phenomenal
intentionality.



An obvious objection is that many perceptual states and other clearly
intentional occurrent states are not conscious in sense (1) above;
their subjects are entirely unaware of them, and they have no
phenomenology at all. Kriegel (2011) replies, contending that the
intentionality of such states is not "intrinsic" but
"interpretivist," merely charitable interpretation
a la Donald Davidson and D.C. Dennett. Mendelovici (2018, Ch.
8) reviews several further strategies and proposes a combination of
those.



A further objection is that since phenomenal intentionality is narrow,
the view cannot account for the wide intentionality of everyday mental
states. Proponents reply either that wide "contents" are
not really contents (e.g., Horgan and Tienson, Bourget (2010)), or
that they are derived in a deflationary way from the narrow phenomenal
contents (e.g., Siewert, Kriegel, Farkas (2008)). 



The "phenomenal intentionality" view will have to be
considered on its merits, and after we have seen what account it
affords of the sensory qualities. (However, it blocks any direct
argument for representationalism based on transparency. Indeed,
Kriegel (2007, p. 321) appeals to transparency in support of
phenomenal intentionality.) For further discussion, see the entry on
 phenomenal intentionality.


### 4.4 "Laws of appearance"



Pautz (2017) points out that there are restrictions on sensory
appearances that have no parallel for other intentional states such as
beliefs. For example, a surface cannot appear both round and square,
or both pure red and pure yellow at the same place at the same time;
nor can anything seem round or red but not extended. Pautz contends
that such impossibilities are metaphysical in strength. In contrast,
there is nothing metaphysically or even nomologically impossible, but
only irrational, about contradictory or otherwise anomalous beliefs or
desires. How is a representationalist to explain the existence of such
laws?



Speaks (2017) responds by questioning whether the laws are
metaphysically necessary. Perhaps they arise simply from how we are
built. We might have had sense modalities that worked differently, in
such a way as to allow representation of the anomalous states of
affairs.



Further, even if the impossibilities are metaphysical, they may arise
from the metaphysics of functional roles of sensory states rather than
from the sense modalities' representational capacities.


### 4.5 Counterexamples



Now we come to the cases in which, allegedly, either two experiences
differ in their sensory qualities without differing in intentional
content or they differ entirely in their intentional content but share
sensory qualities. Let us start with the degenerate case in which
(supposedly) there is no intentional content to begin with.


#### 4.5.1 Nonintentional mental states



If every sensory quality is a represented property, then phenomenal
character in sense (3) is exhausted by the intentionality of the
relevant experience. Since vision is pretty plainly representational,
it is no surprise that representationalists have talked mainly about
color qualities. But many other mental states that have phenomenal
character are not intentional and do not represent anything: bodily
sensations, and especially moods. Rey (1998): "Many have noted
that states like that of elation, depression, anxiety, pleasure,
orgasm seem to be just overall states of *oneself*, and not
features of presented objects" (p. 441, italics original). For
that matter, it is hardly obvious that every specifically perceptual
experience represents--smell, for example, does not clearly do
so.



The representationalist has several options here. First, s/he could
restrict the thesis to perceptual experiences, or to states that are
admitted to be intentional. But that would be ad hoc, and would leave
the phenomenal character of the excluded mental states entirely
unexplained.



Second, representationalists such as Lycan (1996, 2001) and Tye (1995,
2003b) have, in some detail, defended Brentano's thesis that in
fact every mental state is intentional, including bodily sensations
and moods. It is easy enough to argue that pains and tickles and even
orgasms have some representational features (see Tye (1995) and Lycan
(1996)). For example, a pain is felt as being in a certain part of
one's body, *as if* that part is disordered in a certain
way; that is why pains are described as "burning,"
"stabbing," "throbbing" and the like. Though
it is harder to maintain that a mood has intentional content, it is
plausible to say that a state of elation, for example, represents
one's surroundings as being beautiful and exciting, and
free-floating anxiety represents that something bad is about to
happen. However, this does not answer the previous objection that even
when it is admitted that a pain, a tickle, or a general depression
does represent something, that representational content does not loom
very large in the overall phenomenal character of the mental state in
question.



Third, if transparency is rejected, other introspectible features of
an experience can be allowed to count as part of its phenomenal
character. Lycan (1998) argues that for some mental states, sensory
qualities do not exhaust their "overall feel." Consider
pains. Armstrong (1968) and Pitcher (1970) argued convincingly that
pains are representational and have intentional objects, real or
unreal as usual, which objects are unsalutary conditions of body
parts; pain is a kind of proprioception. But those intentional objects
are not all I can introspect about a pain. I can also introspect its
awfulness, its urgency. We should distinguish the pain's sensory
quality, its specifically sensory core (say, the throbbing character
of a headache) from the pain's affective and conative aspect
that constitutes its awfulness. Those are not normally felt as
distinct, but two different neurological subsystems are responsible
for the overall experience, and they can come apart. The quality is
what remains under morphine; what morphine blocks is the affective
aspect--the desire that the pain stop, the distraction, the urge
to pain-behave. It is then open to the materialist to treat the
affective components as functional rather than representational, and
that is not ad hoc.



Fourth, recall the distinction between senses (3) and (4) of the
tricky term "phenomenal character." As always, the
representational theory addresses only sense (3). But sense (4), that
of "what it's like" to entertain a given sensory
quality, can be generalized: It is not only qualities that have the
higher-order what-it's-like property; arguably propositional
attitudes and other states that do not involve qualities in sense (3),
such as occurrent thoughts, have it too (Siewert (1998), Pitt (2004)).
So the representationalist can accuse the present objection of
confusing (4) with (3). It remains to be argued how plausible that
accusation would be.


#### 4.5.2 Same intentional contents, different sensory qualities



Peacocke (1983) gave three examples of this kind, Block (1995, 1996) a
few others; for discussion of those, see Lycan (1996). Tye (2003a)
provides an extensive catalogue of further cases, and rebuts them on
the representationalist's behalf. In each case, the
representationalist tries to show that there are after all intentional
differences underlying the qualitative differences in question.



*Trees*. In Peacocke's leading example, your experience
represents two (actual) trees, at different distances from you but as
being of the same physical height and other dimensions; "[y]et
there is also some sense in which the nearest tree occupies more of
your visual field than the more distant tree" (p. 12). That
sense is a qualitative sense, and Peacocke maintains that the
qualitative difference is unmatched by any representational
difference.



Tye (1995) and others have rejoined that there are after all
identifiable representational differences constituting the qualitative
differences in the trees example. Tye points to the fact that one of
the trees subtends a larger visual angle from the subject's
point of view, and he argues that this fact is itself
(nonconceptually) represented by the visual experience. Lycan contends
that perceptual representation is layered, and vision in particular
represents physical objects such as trees *by* representing
items called "shapes," most of which are nonactual; in the
trees case differing shapes are represented. Much more promisingly,
Schellenberg (2008) appeals to "situation-dependent"
properties of external objects, by perceiving which we also perceive
the high-level properties of the same objects. Byrne (2001) merely
observes that one of the trees is represented as being farther from
the subject than the other. Bourget (2015) even less commissively
points out that your experience represents fewer small features of the
farther tree. For further discussion, see Millar (2010).



Peacocke's second and third examples concern, respectively,
binocular vision and the Necker reversible-cube illusion. On the
former, see Tye (1992) and Lycan (1996). The latter has given rise to
a distinctive literature.



*Aspect-perception and attention.* The Necker cube is one of a
growing family of alleged counterexamples involving aspect-perception
or selective attention. Others include ambiguous pictures such as the
famous duck-rabbit; arrays of dots or geometric figures which can be
"grouped" by vision in alternate ways; or other displays
which can be attended to in multiple ways. In each case, a single and
unchanging figure that seems to be univocally represented by vision
nonetheless gives rise to differing visual experiences.



Representationalists of course respond by trying to specify distinct
properties as characteristic representata in the differing
experiences. For example, a "duck" experience of the
duck-rabbit will represent the property of being a bill without
representing that of being an ear; the "rabbit" experience
will do the opposite. One way of grouping dots will mobilize the
concept of a row but not that of a column, etc. Macpherson (2006)
offers a rich survey of such examples and rebuts representationalist
replies both existing and anticipated.



One of the most interesting recent examples (not discussed by
Macpherson) is offered by Nickel (2007):





|  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 

Figure 1|  |  |  |
|  |  |  |
|  |  |  |

 |  | 

Figure 2|  1  |  2  |  3  |
|  4  |  5  |  6  |
|  7  |  8  |  9  |

 |




Nickel says we can see an arbitrarily chosen set of constituent
squares "as prominent." For example, in Figure 1 we can
see the squares corresponding to 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 as prominent, or
alternately see 2, 4, 6, and 8 as prominent, without changing where we
look and, it seems, while representing just the same figure and its
elements all the while. In particular, we need not change the focus of
our vision, but leave it on the center of Figure 1, yet have different
experiences.



The representationalist has several options here. First, focusing on
Nickel's phrase "see as prominent," s/he could claim
that a distance illusion is created, so that the "farther
away" relation is represented; or, noting that the preposition
"as" seems already to be representational language, s/he
could appropriate Nickel's own term "prominent" as
designating a property and just leave it unexplicated. Second, the
representationalist could insist that the figure is pictorial, and
then invoke some version of figure-ground, or assimilate the case to
seeing-as of some other sort (assuming s/he had already provided a
representational account of seeing-as more generally). Third, s/he
might reject Nickel's assumption that the whole figure is
actually seen at one time, writing off the contrary impression as what
Noe (2004) calls "presence as absence." And there are
other possibilities, though each is bound to be contentious.



Block (2010) offers cases in which shifts of attention seem to change
sensory qualities (Carrasco (2006)). "The effect of attention is
experienced in terms of appearance of contrast, speed, size, color
saturation, etc. Attended things look bigger, faster, more saturated,
and higher in contrast" (p. 44). Realism about contrast, speed
and the rest being assumed, it would seem clear that if an attended
thing looks (e.g.) bigger than its actual size, that is just a false
or inaccurate representation. But Block takes pains to forestall that
inference.

 For further defense of representationalism against
these and still more examples of subjective differences in
"grouping" and/or "prominence," see Green
(2016).


*Blurry vision*. We must revisit that case (which actually was
introduced as a problem for representationalism by Boghossian and
Velleman (1989)), because it requires a wrinkle in the
representationalist strategy. The normal representationalist move
would be to say that the visual experience represents the relevant
part of the world as being blurry, but here we want to concede that
there is a phenomenal difference between seeing an object as being
blurry and blurrily seeing a nonblurry object. Tye (2003a) points out
that that difference can be characterized informationally: In the
former case, as when looking at a blurry painting, vision represents
the blurred edges as such, and just where they lie. But in the latter,
vision provides less information, and fails to represent the sharp
edges. Tye distinguishes similarly between nonveridically seeing a
sharp object as blurry, which experience incorrectly represents the
boundaries as fuzzy, and seeing the same object blurrily, which does
not represent them, except to place them within broad limits. Allen
(2013) contends, to the contrary, that a blurry visual experience
represents objects as having multiple boundaries. Bourget (2015)
argues that, whatever the positive details, a blurry experience
*loses* some of the content that would be represented by a
sharper experience of the exact same scene.


#### 4.5.3 Inversions



Inversion examples in the tradition of Locke's "inverted
spectrum" form a special category of alleged counterexamples to
representationalism. Some fit the foregoing model (same intentional
contents, different sensory qualities), some do not. Lockean inversion
was that of color qualities with respect to behavioral dispositions,
which is regarded as possible by everyone except behaviorists and
Wittgensteinians. To find an inversion counterexample to the
representational theory, the objector would have to posit qualities
inverted with respect to all representational contents, or, in the
case of "mixed" or "quasi-"
representationalism, qualities inverted with respect to all
representational contents *and* all the relevant functional
etc. properties. (It is important to see that the latter inversion
hypothesis is much more ambitious and should be much more
controversial than the original Lockean idea.)



Shoemaker (1991) contends that this strong sort of inversion is
possible, i.e., that sensory qualities could invert with respect to
representational contents. But his only argument seems to be that such
an inversion is imaginable, or conceivable in a thin sense. Since the
representationalist's claim is precisely that sensory qualities
just are representational contents of a certain kind, but not that
this is analytically or conceptually true, Shoemaker has given her/him
no reason to think that the inversion is really, metaphysically,
possible. (Also, it is too easy to think of color looks inverting with
respect to *mere* representation; cf. the opening paragraph of
Section 2. One has to try to imagine their inverting with respect to
*visual* representation of the appropriate type.) Yet there are
further inversion scenarios, supported by argument, that the
representationalist must take seriously.



*Fish-heads*. Building on an example of Byrne's (2001),
Levine (2003) supposes that there are creatures whose eyes are on
opposite sides of their heads and whose heads are fixed, so that they
never look at an object with both eyes. Now, imagine one such creature
whose eyes' lenses are color-inverted with respect to each
other. (It is not that one lens has been inverted; the creatures are
born thus mismatched.) It seems that identically colored objects
simultaneously presented will look, say, green to one eye but red to
the other. Yet the same worldly color property (i.e., a reflectance
property of whatever sort) is being represented by each eye. Now,
every eye is normal within the population, so neither can easily be
described as *mis*representing the colors of red objects. Each
eye just sees the colors differently, and so the difference is not
exhausted by the common representatum.



The first point to be made on the representationalist's behalf
is that, as Levine goes on to admit (p. 71), the eyes seem to be
representing the world differently; "space appears differently
filled on the two sides of the head." Also, if the fish-head
were able to turn and look at the same object first with one eye and
then with the other and back again, the object would successively
appear to it *to be* different colors. So we do not here have a
case of phenomenal difference without representational difference.



But there is still a puzzle. If the two eyes are representing
different properties and neither is misrepresenting, and only the one
surface reflectance property is involved, what are the two distinct
representata? Several options are available. (i) One could try to find
a basis for saying that one of the eyes is (after all)
misrepresenting, though it is hard to imagine what basis that might
be. (ii) As Levine points out, one could fall in with the view of
Shoemaker (1994) mentioned in Section 2, that the eyes are
representing distinct *dispositions* even though the
dispositions are realized by the same physical properties. (iii) If
the eyes are mutually color-inverted, then they differ functionally. A
psychosemantics such as Dretske's (1986) that makes essential
reference to function might therefore distinguish representata here.
(iv) To the extent that each creature's two eyes differ
functionally from each other, the creature has two different and
nonequivalent visual systems. Perhaps, then, we cannot say that either
eye represents its red object as red, or as green; the same
reflectance property is one color for one of the visual systems and a
different color for the other, as it might be between two different
species of organism, and we do not know what those colors are. That
the realizing reflectance property is the same in each case does not
establish sameness of representatum, because that property may be a
common disjunct of each of two distinct disjunctive properties that
are respectively colors for the two types of visual system.



*Inverted Earth*. Block (1990) appeals to an "Inverted
Earth," a planet exactly like Earth except that its real
physical colors are (somehow) inverted with respect to ours. The
Inverted Earthlings' speech sounds just like English, but their
intentional contents in regard to color are inverted relative to ours:
When they say "red," they mean green (if it is green
Inverted objects that correspond to red Earthly objects under the
inversion in question), and green things *look* green to them
even though they call those things "red." Now, an
Earthling victim is chosen by the customary mad scientists, knocked
out, fitted with color inverting lenses, transported to Inverted
Earth, and repainted to match that planet's human skin and hair
coloring. Block contends that after some length of time--a few
days or a few millennia--the victim's word meanings and
propositional-attitude contents and all other intentional contents
will shift to match the Inverted Earthlings' contents, but,
intuitively, the victim's color qualities will remain the same.
Thus, sensory qualities are not intentional contents.



A natural representationalist reply is to insist that if the
intentional contents would change, so too would the qualitative
contents. Block's nearly explicit argument for denying this is
that "qualia" (he fails to distinguish sensory qualities,
sense (3), from their higher-order "what it's like"
properties, sense (4)) are narrow, while the intentional contents
shift under environmental pressure precisely because they are wide. If
sensory qualities are indeed narrow, and all the intentional contents
are wide and would shift, then Block's argument succeeds.
(Stalnaker (1996) gives a version of Block's argument that does
not depend on the assumption that the qualities are narrow; Lycan
(1996) rebuts it.)



Three replies are available, then: (i) To insist that the visual
intentional contents would not shift. Word meanings would shift, but
it does not follow that visual contents ever would. (ii) To hold that
although all the ordinary intentional contents would shift, there is a
special class of narrow though still representational contents
underlying the wide contents; sensory qualities can be identified with
the special narrow contents. (iii) To deny that qualitative content is
narrow and argue that it is wide, i.e., that two molecularly
indistinguishable people could indeed experience different qualities.
This last is the position that Dretske (1996) has labelled
"phenomenal externalism," though (again) in our
terminology that would have been "qualitative"
externalism.



Reply (i) has not been much pursued. (ii) has, a bit, by Tye (1994)
and especially Rey (1998). Rey argues vigorously that
"qualia" are narrow, and then offers a narrow
representational theory. (But as previously mentioned, it turns out
that Rey's theory is not a theory of sensory qualities; see
Section 4.5.) Note that Fregean as opposed to Russellian
representationalism is well suited to (ii); even if the Russellian
contents shift, the Fregean contents need not. Chalmers (2004)
advocates such a view. (Papineau (2014) offers a fourth alternative:
to say that although sensory states do represent worldly properties
such as color and shape, the sensory qualities themselves are simply
not representata and do not shift when the environment is inverted;
rather, they are just narrow properties of subjects. He tries to
explain away our feeling that sensory qualities are presented to the
mind as worldly.)



Reply (iii) has been defended by Dretske (1995, 1996), Tye (1995) and
Lycan (1996, 2001). A number of people (even Tye himself (1998)) have
since called the original contrary assumption that sensory qualities
are narrow a "deep / powerful / compelling" intuition, but
it proves to be highly disputable. Here are two arguments, though not
very strong arguments, for the claim that the qualities are wide.



First, if the representational theory is correct, then sensory
qualities are determined by whatever determines a psychological
state's intentional content; in particular, the color properties
represented are taken to be physical properties instanced in the
subject's environment. What determines a psychological
state's intentional content is given by a
*psychosemantics*, in Fodor's (1987) sense. But every
known plausible psychosemantics makes intentional contents wide. Of
course, the representational theory is just what is in question; but
if one grants that it is independently plausible or at least
defensible, the further step to externalism is not a giant step.



Second, suppose sensory qualities are narrow. Then Block's
Inverted Earth argument is plausible, and it would show that either
the qualities are narrow functional properties or they are properties
of a very weird kind whose existence is suggested by nothing else we
know (see Ch. 6 of Lycan (1996)). But sensory qualities are not
functional properties, at least not narrow ones: recall the Bertie
dilemma. Also, they are ostensibly monadic properties, while
functional properties are all relational; and see further
Block's anti-functionalist arguments in Block (1978). So, either
sensory qualities are wide or weirdness is multiplied beyond
necessity. Of course, that dichotomy will be resisted by anyone who
offers a narrow representationalist theory as in (ii) above.



*The Scrambler*. Biggs (2009) constructs a complicated example
in which a human-like species has evolved in such a way that the
sensory qualities inhering in its members' perceptual states are
entirely disconnected both functionally and causal-historically from
their worldly environments. Biggs argues that those states simply lack
representational content, and he anticipates and rebuts the most
likely replies. 


### 4.6 Arguments against Wide Representationalism



Although until the mid-1990s the assumption that sensory qualities are
narrow had been tacit and undefended, opponents of wide
representationalism have since defended the assumption with vigor.
Here are (only) some of their arguments, with sample replies. (For a
fuller discussion, see Lycan (2001).)



*Introspection*. Block's Earthling suddenly transported
to Inverted Earth or some other relevant sort of Twin Earth would
notice nothing introspectively, despite a change in representational
content; so the sensory quality must remain unchanged and so is
narrow.



Reply: The same goes for propositional attitudes, i.e., the
transported Earthling would notice nothing introspectively. Yet the
attitude contents are still wide. Wideness does not entail
introspective change under transportation.



*Narrow content*. In the propositional-attitude literature, the
corresponding transportation argument has been taken as the basis of
an argument for "narrow content," viz., for something that
is intentional content within the meaning of the act but is narrow
rather than, as usual, wide. The self-knowledge problem
aforementioned, and the problem of "wide causation" (Fodor
(1987), Kim (1995)), have also been used to motivate narrow content.
And, indeed, any general argument for narrow content will presumably
apply to sensory representation as well as to propositional attitudes.
If there is narrow content at all, and sensory content is
representational, then probably sensory states have narrow content
too. Thus, sensory qualities can and should be taken to be the narrow
contents of such states.



Replies: First, this begs the question against the claim that the
qualities are wide. Even if there are indeed narrow contents impacted
within sensory states, independent argument is needed for the
identification of sensory qualities with those contents rather than
with wide contents. Second and more strongly, narrow sensory contents
still would not correspond to sensory qualities in our sense. So far
as has been shown, the redness of a patch in my visual field is still
a wide property, even if some other, narrow property underlies it in
the same way that (mysterious, ineffable) narrow contents are supposed
to underlie beliefs and desires.



*Modelling a shift of qualities*. If perceptual contents are
wide and the environment is subject to change, we should expect a
shift, even if the perceptual contents would not shift as readily as
attitude contents would. Perhaps they would eventually shift after
several centuries on Inverted Earth, if a subject could stay alive
that long. But how would a distinctive quality even imaginably undergo
such a shift? For example, suppose that a quality is supposed to shift
from blue to yellow. A shift from blue to yellow might reasonably be
supposed to be a smooth and gradual shift along the spectrum that
passes through green. But it is hardly plausible that one would
experience such a shift, or a period of unmistakable greenness in
particular.



Reply: We have no plausible model for a shift of everyday attitude
content either. How would a type of belief state smoothly go from
being about blue to being about yellow? Presumably not by being about
green in between. So our presumed quality shift is no worse off than
the attitudinal shift in this regard; if the present argument works
for the former case, it also works for the latter, contrary to
hypothesis.



To this it may be rejoined that attitude contents are more tractable,
in that they may yield to some view of aboutness according to which
reference can *divide* for a time between contents such as blue
and yellow. (E.g., Field's (1973) theory of "partial
reference.") It is harder to imagine "divided"
phenomenology.



*Modes of presentation* (Rey (1998); Chalmers (2004) defends a
similar view). There is no such thing as representation without a mode
of presentation. If a sensory quality is a representatum, then it is
represented under a mode of presentation, and modes of presentation
may be narrow even when the representational content itself is wide.
Indeed, many philosophers of mind take modes of presentation to be
internal causal or functional roles played by the representations in
question. Surely they are strong candidates for qualitative content.
Are they not narrow qualitative features?



Reply: Remember, the sensory qualities themselves are properties like
subjective greenness and redness, which according to the
representational theory are representata. The modes or guises
*under which* greenness and redness are represented in vision
are something else again.



But it can plausibly be argued that such modes and guises are
qualitative or phenomenal properties of some sort, perhaps
higher-order properties. See the next section.



*Memory* (Block (1996)). "[Y]ou remember the color of the
sky on your birthday last year, the year before that, ten years before
that, and so on, and your long-term memory gives you good reason to
think that the phenomenal character of the experience has not
changed.... Of course, memory *can* go wrong, but why
should we suppose that it **must** go wrong here?"
(pp. 43-44, italics and boldface original). The idea is that
memory acts as a check on the sensory qualities, and can be used to
support the claim that the qualities have remained unchanged despite
the wholesale shift in representational contents.



Reply: Memory contents are wide, and so by Block's own reasoning
they will themselves undergo the representational shift to the
Inverted-Earth complementary color. Thus, your post-shift memories of
good old Earth are false. When you say or think to yourself,
"Yes, the sky looks as blue as it did thirty years ago,"
you are not expressing the same memory content as you would have when
you had just arrived on Inverted Earth. You are now remembering or
seeming to remember that the sky looked yellow, since for you
"blue" now means yellow. And that memory is false, since
on the long-ago occasion the sky looked blue to you, not yellow;
memory is not after all a reliable check on the sensory qualities.
(Lycan (1996) takes this line; Tye (1998) expands it in more
detail.)



*Structural mismatch.* Following Hardin (1988) and others,
Pautz (2014, 2019) argues that the structural properties of a sensory
field, paradigmatically resemblance relations, match the neural
substrates of the relevant experiences rather than the chemical or
physical properties of the representata. For example, the sensory
quality blue resembles purple more strongly than it resembles green,
but the reflectances underlying worldly objects are the other way
around: the blue reflectance type resembles the green reflectance type
more than it does the purple. Even more dramatic mismatches obtain in
the case of smell. Therefore, it seems that a sensory quality is a
narrow property rather than the wide worldly one predicted by standard
externalist psychosemantics.



Reply: First, that a sense modality represents two worldly properties
as being similar to degree *n* does not entail that they are
thus similar; there may be illusion regarding resemblance. Second,
there will be room for debate regarding exactly what chemical or
physical properties do constitute the representata, and regarding what
psychosemantics connects those properties to the sensory
experience.



Hardly anyone will accept all of the foregoing replies. But no one
should now find it uncontestable either that sensory qualities are
narrow or that they are wide. The matter is likely to remain
controversial for some time to come.


## 5. What It's Like



Some philosophers (e.g., Dretske (1995), Tye (1995)) use this
troublesome expression simply to mean a sensory quality, and this is
one of the two meanings it has had in recent philosophy of mind. But
in the fourth paragraph of this entry, the phrase was introduced in
the context, "'what it's like' for the subject
to be in a particular mental state, especially what it is like for
that subject to experience a particular qualitative property,"
which indicates that there is another sense (4) in which (when the
mental state does involve a sensory quality) the "what
it's like" is something over and above the quality itself.
In fact, since this second "what it's like" is
itself a property of the quality, it cannot very well be identical
with the quality. It is the property of what it is like *to
experience* that quality; alternately, the relevant introspectible
property of the experience itself. Let us now just speak of
"what it's like" (WIL) properties, meaning just this
higher-order phenomenal sort.


### 5.1 Higher-order "What It's Like," Distinct from Sensory Qualities



Block (1995), like many other writers, fails to distinguish WIL
properties from sensory qualities. But Carruthers (2000) elaborates
nicely on the distinction: A quality in the first-order sense presents
itself as part of the world, not as part of one's mind. It is,
e.g., the apparent color of an apparently physical object (or, if you
are a Russellian, the color of a sense-datum that you happen to have
encountered as an object of consciousness). A sensory quality is what
*the world* is or seems like. But what it is like to experience
that color is what your first-order perceptual state is like,
intrinsically mental and experienced as such.



Here are two further reasons for maintaining such a distinct sense of
the phrase. First, a sensory quality can be described in one's
public natural language, while what it is like to experience the
quality seems to be ineffable. Suppose Ludwig asks Bertie, "How,
exactly, does the after-image look to you as regards color?"
Bertie replies, "I told you, it looks green."
"Yes," says Ludwig, "but can you tell me what
it's like to experience that 'green' look?"
"Well, the image looks the same color as that," says
Bertie, pointing to George Edward's cloth coat. "No, I
mean, can you tell me what it's like intrinsically, not
comparatively?" "Um,...." --In one way,
Bertie can describe the phenomenal color, paradigmatically as
"green." But when asked what it is like to experience that
green, he goes mute. So there is a difference between (a) "what
it's like" in the bare sense of the quality, the
phenomenal color that can be described using ordinary color words, and
(b) "what it's like" to experience that phenomenal
color, the WIL property, which cannot easily be described in public
natural language at all.



Second, Armstrong (1968), Nelkin (1989), Rosenthal (1991), and Lycan
(1996) have argued that sensory qualities can fail to be conscious in
the earlier sense of awareness; a quality can occur without its being
even slightly noticed by its subject. But in such a case, there is a
good sense in which it would not be like anything for the subject to
experience that quality. (Of course, in the first, Dretske-Tye sense
there would be something it was like, since the quality itself is
that. But in another sense, if the subject is *entirely
unaware* of the quality, it is odd even to speak of the subject as
"experiencing" it, much less of there being something it
is like for the subject to experience it.) So even in the case in
which one is aware of one's quality, the second type of
"what it's like," the WIL property, requires
awareness and so is something distinct from the quality itself.


### 5.2 Arguments against Materialism Based on "What It's Like"



It is the second sense of "what it's like" that
figures in anti-materialist arguments from subjects'
"knowing what it's like," primarily Nagel's
(1974) "Bat" argument and Jackson's (1982)
"Knowledge" argument, Chalmers' (1996, 2003)
Conceivability argument, and Levine's (1983, 2001) Explanatory
Gap arguments. To begin with the first of those: Jackson's
character Mary, a brilliant color scientist trapped in an entirely
black-and-white laboratory, nonetheless becomes omniscient as regards
the physics and chemistry of color, the neurophysiology of color
vision, and every other public, objective fact conceivably relevant to
human color experience. Yet when she is finally released from her
captivity and ventures into the outside world, she sees colors for the
first time, and learns something: namely, she learns what it is like
to see red and the other colors. Thus she seems to have learned a new
fact, one that by hypothesis is not a public, objective fact. It is an
intrinsically perspectival fact. This is what threatens materialism,
since according to that doctrine, every fact about every human mind is
ultimately a public, objective fact.



Upon her release, Mary has done two things: She has at last hosted a
red sensory quality, and she has learned what it is like to experience
a red quality. In experiencing it she has experienced a "what
it's like" in the first of our two senses. But the fact
she has learned has the ineffability characteristic of our second
sense of "what it's like"; were Mary to try to pass
on her new knowledge of a WIL property to a still color-deprived
colleague, she would not be able to express it in English.



We have already surveyed the representational theory of sensory
qualities. But there are also representational theories of "what
it's like" in the second sense (4). A common reply to the
arguments of Nagel and Jackson (Horgan (1984), Van Gulick (1985),
Churchland (1985), Tye (1986), Lycan (1987, 1990, 1996, 2003), Loar
(1990), Rey (1991), Leeds (1993)) is to note that a knowledge
difference does not entail a difference in fact known, for one can
know a fact under one representation or mode of presentation but fail
to know one and the same fact under a different mode of presentation.
Someone might know that water is splashing but not know that
H2O molecules are moving, and vice versa; someone might
know that person X is underpaid without knowing that she herself is
underpaid, even if she herself is in fact person X. Thus, from
Mary's before-and-after knowledge difference, Jackson is not
entitled to infer the existence of a new, weird fact, but at most that
of a new way of representing. Mary has not learned a new fact, but has
only acquired a new, introspective or first-person way of representing
one that she already knew in its neurophysiological guise.



(As noted above, the posited introspective modes of presentation for
sensory qualities in the first-order sense are strong candidates for
the title of "qualia" in a distinct, higher-order sense of
the term, and they may well be narrow rather than wide. This is what
Rey (1998) seems to be talking about.)



This attractive response to Nagel and Jackson--call it the
"perspectivalist" response--requires that the
first-order qualitative state itself be represented (else how could it
be newly known under Mary's new mode of presentation?). And that
hypothesis in turn encourages a representational theory of
higher-order conscious awareness and introspection. However,
representational theories of awareness face powerful objections, the
perspectivalist must either buy into such a theory despite its
liabilities, or find some other way of explicating the idea of an
introspective or first-person perspective without appealing to
higher-order representation. The latter option does not seem
promising. And a further question raised by the perspectivalist
response concerns the nature of the alleged first-person
representation itself.



It has become popular, especially among materialists, to speak of
"phenomenal concepts,"and to suppose that Mary has
acquired one which she can now apply to her first-order qualitative
state; it is in that way that she is able to represent the old fact in
a new way. Phenomenal concepts figure also in responses to the
Conceivability and Explanatory Gap arguments.



The Conceivability argument (Chalmers 1996, 2003) has it that
"zombies" are conceivable--physical duplicates of
ordinary human beings, that share all the human physical and
functional states but lack phenomenal consciousness in sense (4);
there is nothing it is like to be a zombie. The argument then moves
from bare conceivability to genuine metaphysical possibility, which
would refute materialism. According to the Explanatory Gap argument
(Levine 1983, 2001), no amount of physical, functional or other
objective information could explain why a given sensory state feels to
its subject in the way it does, and the best explanation of this in
turn is that the feel is an extra fact that does not supervene on the
physical.



Lormand (2004) offers a very detailed linguistic analysis of the
formula "There is something it is like for [creature] *c*
to have [mental state] M," and on its basis defends the claim
that instances of that formula as well as more specific attributions
of WIL properties can in fact be conceptually deduced at least from
"nonphenomenal" facts about subjects.



What the Knowledge, Conceivability and Explanatory Gap arguments have
in common is that they move from an alleged epistemic gap to a
would-be materialism-refuting metaphysical one. Though some
materialists balk at once and refuse to admit the epistemic gap, more
grant the epistemic gap and resist the move to the metaphysical one.
The epistemic gap, on this view, is created by the "conceptual
isolation" of phenomenal concepts from all others, and it is
conceptual only rather than metaphysical. Stoljar (2005) calls this
the "phenomenal concept strategy". There are a number of
distinct positive accounts of phenomenal concepts and how they work;
such concepts are: "recognitional" (Loar (1990),
Carruthers (2000), Tye (2003c)); proprietary lexemes of an internal
monitoring system (Lycan (1996)); indexical (Perry (2001), O'Dea
(2002), Schellenberg (2013)); demonstrative (Levin (2007), Stalnaker
(2008), Schroer (2010)); "quotational" or
"constitutive" (Papineau (2002), Balog (2012));
"unimodal" (Dove and Elpidorou (2016)). Some of those
accounts are minimal, aspiring only to block the key inferences in the
anti-materialist arguments aforementioned. Others, particularly the
constitutive account, are more detailed and offer to explain more
specific features of WIL properties. For example, Papineau points out
that the constitutive account explains the odd persistent
attractiveness of some of the obviously fallacious antimaterialist
arguments. He and Balog each argue that the account, according to
which a phenomenal concept token is at least partly constituted by the
very mental state-token that is its referent, explains the special
directness of the reference: no feature of the state is appealed to
(and *a fortiori* no neural, functional, causal etc. feature);
Balog adds that since the referent is literally contained and present
in the concept token, "there will always be something it is
like" to do the tokening (p. 7).



The phenomenal concept strategy is criticized by Raffman (1995),
Stoljar (2005), Prinz (2007), Chalmers (2007), Ball (2009), Tye
(2009), Demircioglu (2013), and Shea (2014). For further works and
references see Alter and Walter (2007), Sundstrom (2011) and
Elpidorou (2015). Chalmers offers a "Master Argument"
meant to refute any version of the strategy: it is a dilemma based on
whether it is conceivable that the complete fundamental physical truth
holds yet we possess no phenomenal concepts (having whichever
features). The argument is criticized by Papineau (2007), Carruthers
and Veillet (2007), and Balog (2012).


### 5.3 "Illusionism"



It is possible simply to deny the existence of WIL properties, as do
Dennett (1991) and Dretske (1995); see also Humphrey (1992, 2011),
Hall (2007), Pereboom (2011) and Tartaglia (2013). To do that is of
course not to defend a representational theory or any other theory of
them. But it would be good to explain away the majority belief in such
properties, and some theorists do that in representational terms,
arguing that other, real properties are misrepresented in
introspection as WIL properties; Frankish (2016) calls this strategy
"illusionism." An obvious instance of such a
misrepresentation would be to mistake a sensory quality for a WIL
property; since the conflation of the two is already rife even among
sophisticated philosophers, WIL deniers may suggest that what was
introspected was only a sensory quality. (That is one way of
understanding Dretske's position, bar his resistance to the very
notion of introspection as in Dretske (2003).) And as before, the
phrase "what it's like" has nontendentiously been
used as referring to a sensory quality rather than to a property of a
whole experience. Several authors point out that to reject WIL
properties is not to grant Chalmers' (1996) claim that for a
zombie lacking WIL properties, "all is dark inside" (pp.
95-6).



Rey (1992) suggests that introspection mistakes the lack of detail it
delivers for the accurate representation of a simple ineffable
property. Alternately or in addition (1995), having detected stable
and identifiable complexes of involuntary responses to states of
ourselves and to living creatures who look and behave like us, for
example the commonsense causal, representational, conative and
affective syndrome we lump together using the word 'pain',
we project a simple quality onto the others and into ourselves. Rey
and Pereboom each compare the projection of WIL properties into the
mind by introspection to vision's projection of simple
homogeneous color properties onto environmental objects.



Illusionism is criticized by Strawson (2006), Prinz (2016), Balog
(2016), Nida-Rumelin (2016), Schwitzgebel (2016), and Chalmers
(2018). Though highly sympathetic to illusionism, Kammerer (2018)
argues that no previously existing account can explain the strength of
the illusion. For general discussion, see the essays collected in
Frankish (2017), and for further defense, see Shabasson (2022).