Transparency and Representationalism

Part One

Intentionality of mental states, and their phenomenal character, has for  long time been taken to be sharply distinct.

Colin McGinn however, argued that: what an experience is like, what it is of, are perhaps not independent properties of an experience.

Dretske is someone who holds that all mental facts are representational: he argues it's the only kind of physicalism that has much to say about phenomenal experience.

On the representationalst view, the phenomenal chracter of a mental state depends on its intentional contet.

Weak representationalism: all phenomenal states have representational content.

Strong representationalism: the phenomenal character of a mental state an be reduced to its intentional content.

The Argument from Transparency: 

1. Transparency thesis: we look 'through' our visual experience, to whatever that visual experience is an experience of. I can see, right now, a blue notebook. But I cannot attendt to the blueness of the experience itself. My attention 'slips through' to the notebook itself: there is no way to attend to the blueness of the experience, without attending to what it represents. Seems to support the claim that there is nothing to the blueness of my experience over and above its representational content.

The Representationalist Argument from Transparency:

Gilbert Harman put the transparency argument to its use in represntational theories.

His example: when Eloise sees a tree, the colours she experiences are experiences as features of the tree and its surroundings... none are experienced as intrinsic features of her experience. Nor does she experience any features of anything as intrinsic features of her experience.

Generalisable to all perceptual experiences. Two perceptual experiences with the same intentional content must be psychologically the same.

Tye: all our phenomenally conscious experiences are transparent. If I have a pain in my leg 'all I end up focusing on is how things seem to be in my leg'. Crane: to pay attention to pain is to pay attention to where it hurts.

Tye points out that the reason we cannot introspectively find any intrinsic features of our experience is just that there are none to be found. He reduces phenomenal character to poised  (in a position to impact belief/desire system) abstract (i.e. independent of any concrete object) nonconceptual intentional content. His argument procceeds by way of…