TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS IN THE

THEORY OF CONTENT

An Inaugural Lecture delivered before

the University of Oxford on 16 May 1989

by

christopher peacocke Wayn f l e t e P r o f e s s o r

of Metaphysical Philosophy

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 1989

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Peacocke, Christopher

Transcendental arguments in the theory of content. 1. Man. Experience

I. Title 121 ISBN 0–19–951566–2

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Peacocke, Christopher

Transcendental arguments in the theory of content: an inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 16 May 1989

by Christopher Peacocke. p. cm.

1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804—Contributions in philosophy of representation of content of experience. 2. Peacocke, Christopher—

Contributions in philosophy of representation of experience. 3. Representation (Philosophy) 4. Experience. 5. Content

(Psychology) 6. Transcendentalism. I. Title. B2799.E9P43 1989

128'.4—dc20 89–39295 CIP ISBN 0–19–951566–2

Typeset and Printed by S + S Press, Abingdon, Oxon

TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS IN THE THEORY OF CONTENT

It is just thirty years since the publication of Peter Straw- son’s book Individuals. Individuals, and its great successor The Bounds of Sense, now stand forth as major landmarks in twentieth-century philosophy.

The themes of these books are deep, and they are treated with great generality. But imagination also plays a crucial part in these writings. The inspirational effects of this com- bination on the reader is as personal a matter as can be, and I can describe only their impact on me. Here was an intrigu- ing common pattern, found in all of Peter Strawson’s most fundamental arguments. A phenomenon is first selected— that of identifying reference to particulars, or of self- conscious thought about experience. The conditions of this possibility are then explored. The discussion moves back and forth between detailed examination of the phenome- non and various candidate descriptions of the ground of its possibility. At the end of this process we appreciate not only the necessary interconnection between various elements of our thought. We understand also the conditions under which the phenomenon would not be possible, its limits. These arguments opened up the possibility that we could actually make progress on some classical issues of metaphysics while still adhering to rigorous standards of reasoning.

Of course Peter Strawson’s contribution extends far beyond his descriptive metaphysics into the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. But one of the hallmarks of this work is its unity. Theoreti-

transcendental arguments 2

cal proposals in these apparently diverse areas are moti- vated by their ability to meet the needs of thinkers who com- municate with one another about an objective world. In this unity we have just one of his many affinities with Kant.

In the Introduction to Individuals, Peter Strawson wrote: ‘No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms; and’, he continued, ‘it is characteristic of the very greatest philosophers, like Kant and Aristotle, that they, more than any others, repay this effort of re-thinking.’1 I hope that what I have to say in the remainder of this lecture suggests that the same is true of Peter Strawson himself.

i

In recent years I have been arguing for the philosophical interest of pursuing a particular programme. One of the aims of this programme is to formulate, for any given con- cept, an account of what it is for a thinker to possess that concept. We can call such an account a statement of the pos- session condition for the concept.

The programme of providing possession conditions for concepts is motivated in part by a Principle of Dependence: the Principle that there can be no more to the nature of a concept than is determined by a correct account of what it is to possess the concept. When it is motivated in that way, the programme of providing possession conditions for con- cepts has many Kantian aspects. These aspects are visible in its conception, its implementation, and its applications. I will be discussing some of these Kantian aspects here.

The Kant with whom the programme shares these aspects is the Kant of The Critique of Pure Reason. One shared

1 P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), 11.

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aspect is an insistence on some form of a Principle of Signifi- cance. Kant accepted a requirement to the effect that knowability requires, as he would put it, some relation to possible experience.2 In the programme on which I have been working, a non-verificationist requirement not merely on knowability, but on significance itself is derivable ulti- mately from the Principle of Dependence. If the Principle of Dependence is true, so too is this Principle: for any men- tal state with a given conceptual content, there must be an account which distinguishes what is involved in the state’s having that content rather than any other. If this Discrimi- nation Principle were violated, then we would have con- tents which are individuated more finely than anything that is determined by possession conditions for the concepts composing the content. That is, the Principle of Depen- dence would be violated. Any alleged concept that violates the Discrimination Principle is, according to the conception of the programme, spurious. It is in this way that the Dis- crimination Principle serves as a Principle of Significance.

A second aspect this approach shares with Kant is found in the general kind of spurious conception to which their respective Principles of Significance are applied. Illusions about the nature of personal identity are obvious targets for application of the Principles of Significance. So are certain spurious conceptions of absolute space and time. Anyone developing such negative applications of the programme has to fulfill an obligation Kant recognized, and certainly did not neglect, viz. that of explaining why we are tempted into spurious conceptions in some cases and not in others.

Kant formulated his positive accounts of the possession of genuine concepts as claims about unknowable, noumenal psychological mechanisms. Peter Strawson has, surely rightly, dismissed transcendental psychology as an

2 Critique of Pure Reason, B166, B195, B724, and throughout the critical discus- sion of rational psychology and of the antinomies.

transcendental arguments 4

‘imaginary subject’.3 But if we accept the Principle of Dependence, concepts are individuated by their possession conditions. That is, concepts are individuated by certain of their psychological relations; and this is a third Kantian aspect. We may, for example, expect the possession condi- tions of certain concepts to mention particular perceptual and other faculties. We may expect certain relatively primi- tive concepts to be individuated in part by their pattern of relations to the way experience represents the world as being. And we may expect the way experience represents the world as being to be individuated in part by the thinker’s relations to the world in which he is embedded. All of these points are arguably reflected in claims Kant made about noumenal psychological mechanisms. It is as if the truth about constitutive relations had been transposed into a noumenal mode. It would be a brave person who claimed that all of Kant can be retransposed back into a constitutive mode to yield truths; but some reconstruction is possible.

I will be concentrating, though, on a fourth Kantian aspect. This is the apparent availability, within each of the two conceptions, of transcendental arguments.

ii

For our purposes a transcendental argument will be any argument with a certain kind of premiss and a certain kind of conclusion. The premiss must state that experiences, perhaps of specified type, occur. The conclusion must entail some proposition whose truth does not require the existence of experiences at all. The more modest transcen- dental arguments have as their conclusions certain propos- itions about a mind-independent world. I call these ‘truth- directed’. The more ambitious arguments have a further

3 P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), 32.

transcendental arguments 5

goal: that of establishing that subjects of the experiences mentioned in their premisses are in a position to know cer- tain truths about a mind-independent world. Such trans- cendental arguments I will call ‘knowledge-directed’. We can also distinguish, as a subset of the truth-directed argu- ments, those which aim to establish that at least some of the experiences mentioned in their premisses must be genuinely veridical perceptions. These we can call ‘percep- tion-directed’.

I shall be concerned with truth-directed and with percep- tion-directed transcendental arguments. The construction of knowledge-directed transcendental arguments would need to draw on the results of a good epistemology, and is beyond my scope here. One does, though, get a little epis- temological mileage just from establishing that some truth- directed transcendental argument is sound, if that can be done. Presumably any convincing reasons for saying that such an argument is sound will be ones which put us in a position to know that it is sound. Presumably we also know that we have experiences of the sort mentioned in the argu- ment’s premiss. With known premisses of an argument- form known to be valid, we are then in a position to know that its conclusion is true. This mileage is, though, likely to be far less than we want from a good epistemology. So brac- keting epistemological issues really is bracketing a substan- tial task.

The transcendental arguments that have been developed in analytical philosophy in the past thirty years have had to face the charge that they depend upon a verificationist theory of meaning. The way in which such arguments appear to be entangled with verificationism varies. In par- ticular, Strawson’s central argument in The Bounds of Sense, which I will consider further below, certainly seems at first blush not to have any verificationist premisses. But other examples are very different. The charge of a dependence

transcendental arguments 6

upon verificationism was most sharply and influentially for- mulated by Barry Stroud.4

Stroud considered some of Strawson’s arguments in Indi- viduals. Stroud was concerned in particular with know- ledge-directed arguments. But for our purposes we can make his point in a stripped-down form which bears immediately on the truth-directed arguments. One of the contents about the mind-independent world that Strawson considered was ‘Objects continue to exist unperceived’. Oversimplifying in a way which causes no distortion of the heart of the issue, we can say that Stroud found in Strawson a commitment to two principles. The first principle was that

If objects continue to exist unperceived, then there are satisfiable criteria for their doing so;

and the second principle was that

If our best criteria for objects’ continuing to exist unperceived are satisfied, then objects do continue to exist unperceived.

Actually, it is far from obvious that verificationism is the only theory of meaning which endorses these two princi- ples. But it certainly does seem that verificationism is suffi- cient for them, if verificationism is the doctrine that the meaning of a sentence, or a content, is individuated by its verification conditions. If verificationism is correct, then the first principle holds, on pain of there being a genuine content that is not verifiable. Presumably the second princi- ple holds too if the ‘best criteria’ it mentions embrace the holding of everything included in the verification condi- tions of a content. No more can be required for the truth of the content, if verificationism is right.

Stroud’s point thus throws down a general challenge to anyone who believes that there are sound transcendental

4 Barry Stroud, ‘Transcendental Arguments’, Journal of Philosophy, 65 (1968), 241–56; repr. in Kant on Pure Reason, ed. R. C. S. Walker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

transcendental arguments 7

arguments. If such arguments involve general commit- ments about meaning or content, what general theory of content is being endorsed? Strawson conceded, in response to Stroud, that transcendental arguments either “rely on an unacceptably simple verificationism or the most they can establish is a certain sort of interdependence of conceptual capacities and beliefs”.5 All the other main parties to the dis- cussion came to accept one or the other of these alterna- tives. Jonathan Bennett reacted by endorsing a commit- ment to verificationism, while Richard Rorty drew the con- clusion that indeed a transcendental argument can be at most an argument for the parasitism of one set of concepts on another.6

I will be giving a different response. Whenever we have an argument that apparently assumes verificationism, the question arises whether there is some revision of the argu- ment which is sound and which can be endorsed by a non- verificationist theory of content. Not every transcendental argument which is sound under a verificationist conception of content can be rebuilt from non-verificationist materials. But I will be arguing that there is a sound, truth-directed transcendental argument that relies upon general consid- erations drawn from a non-verificationist theory of con- tent.

What I have to say on this topic can be seen as an attempt to provide part of the answer to a general challenge which thought about the objective world poses to the theory of content. There are contents of thoughts and experiences which require for their truth that the objective, material world be a certain way. If the generalized Discrimination Principle I stated at the outset is correct, then there must be

5 P.F. Strawson Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (London: Methuen, 1985), 21.

6 Bennett in ‘Analytic Transcendental Arguments’, in Transcendental Arguments and Science, ed. P. Bieri et al. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), and Rorty in ‘Ver- ificationism and Transcendental Arguments’, Noûs, 5 (1971), 3–14.

transcendental arguments 8

facts about what is involved in being in mental states with such objective contents that distinguish them from states with contents that have no such objective significance, and from states that have no truth-evaluable content at all. It is part of the task of the theory of content to say what these facts are.

iii

The premiss of the truth-directed transcendental argument I will be constructing is this: that there are experiences whose representational content is partly non-conceptual. Suppose you see a tree in the quadrangle, a tree of a kind you have never seen before. A specification of the non- conceptual representational content of your experience must. include the fact that you see the tree as located in a particular direction from you; that you see it as at a certain distance from you; and that you see it as having a certain height and three-dimensional shape. Such non- conceptual representional contents are needed in giving the content. of experiences in any sense modality that represents the world as being a certain way. You can hear an unseen wasp as being in a particular direction from you; you can feel a small bottle you are gripping as having a particular shape.

It will help us to use a simple framework for treating these representational contents of experience. The framework I will be suggesting is one that emphasizes the nonconceptual and egocentric character of these contents. The framework is motivated by the intuitive idea that these contents of experience are to be individuated in part by giv- ing a spatial type. The idea is that specifying the content of a perceptual experience involves saying what ways of filling out a space around the origin with surfaces, solids, textures,

transcendental arguments 9

light, and so forth, are consistent with the correctness or veridicality of the experience. Such contents are not built from propositions, concepts, senses, or continuant material objects.

We can sharpen that intuitive formulation a little. There are two steps to take if we are to specify fully one of these spatial types. The first step is to fix an origin and axes. The origin and axes will not be a specific place and set of direc- tions in the real world. This is precisely because we are fix- ing a type which may potentially be instantiated at many dif- ferent places in the real world. Nevertheless, it is important that the origin and axes be labelled by certain interrelated properties. It is this labelling by interrelated properties which helps to constrain what are instantiations of the spa- tial type we are determining. Thus, for instance, one kind of origin is given by the property of being the centre of gravity of a human body, with the three axes given by the directions back–front, left–right, and up–down with respect to the centre of gravity (in the standard upright orientation of the body). In giving the content of tactile experience, we would sometimes have to use as origin something labelled with the property of being the centre of the palm of a human hand, with axes defined by relation to parts of the hand.

Having fixed origin and axes, we need to take the second step in determining one of our spatial types, viz. that of specifying a family of ways of locating surfaces and their properties in the space around the origin. In picking out one of these ways, we need to do at least the following. We need, for each point (strictly one should say point-type) identified by its distance and direction from the origin, to specify whether there is a surface there, and if so what tex- ture, hue, saturation, brightness, and temperature it has at that point, together with its degree of resistance to touch. The orientation of the surface must be included. So must

transcendental arguments 10

much more in the visual case: the direction, intensity, and character of light sources; the rate of change of perceptible properties, including location; indeed it should include sec- ond differentials with respect to time where these prove to be perceptible. There is no requirement. at this point that the conceptual apparatus used in specifying a way of filling out the space be an apparatus of concepts used by the per- ceiver himself. Any apparatus we want to use, however sophisticated, may be employed in fixing the spatial type, however primitive the conceptual resources of the per- ceiver with whom we are concerned. This applies both to the apparatus used in characterizing distances and direc- tions, and to that employed in characterizing the surfaces, features, and the rest.

A spatial type of the sort I am concerned with can now be characterized as a family of such ways of locating surfaces, features, and the rest, in relation to such a labelled origin and family of axes. I call such a spatial type a scenario. We can now also say what. is required for the correctness of the non-conceptual content of an experience. Consider the vol- ume of the real world around the perceiver at the time of a particular experience, with an origin and axes in the real world fixed in accordance with the labelling in the scenario. We can call this a scene. The content of the experience is correct if this scene falls under one of the ways of locating surfaces and the rest which is in the family of ways in the scenario. The correctness of such a content is explained as a matter of instantiation, rather than as the correctness of some set of propositions comprising the content. Such correctness comes in degrees. More or less of the real scene around the perceiver may fall under the spatial type.

There is a very great deal more to be said on all aspects of scenarios. Indeed the framework needs to be enriched to capture various additional layers of content, which still fall

transcendental arguments 11

short of the conceptual.7 Since we should not stray too far from the announced topic of transcendental arguments, I will just mention two illustrative applications of these scenario contents.

Writers on the objective content of experience have often remarked that an experience can have a finer-grained con- tent than can be formulated by using concepts possessed by the experiencer. If you are looking at a range of mountains, it may be correct to say that you see some as rounded, others as jagged. But the content of your visual experience in respect of the shape of the mountains is far more specific than that description indicates. The description involving the concepts round and jagged would cover many different fine-grained contents which your experience could have, contents which are discriminably different from one another.

This fine-grained content is captured in the scenario. Only those ways of filling out the space around you which are consistent with the veridicality of your experience will be included in the scenario. The ways included in the scenario will omit many which equally involve the approp- riate mountains being rounded or jagged.

In describing the scenario, of course we do have to employ concepts. If we are to fix on the scenario uniquely, we will indeed have to use very fine-grained concepts too, to capture the fine-grained content. But it is crucial to observe that the fact that a concept is used in fixing the scenario does not entail that that concept itself is somehow a compo- nent of the experience’s representational content, nor that the concept must be possessed by the experiencer. The fine-grained concepts have done their work when they have fixed a unique spatial type. We must not confuse the scenario, the spatial type itself, with the infinitely various

7 For more on these and other issues involving scenarios, see my ‘Scenarios, Concepts and Perception’ (forthcoming).

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ways of picking it out. The second illustrative application of scenarios concerns

the sense in which the content of perceptual experience is unit-free. The unit-free nature of spatial perception is illus- trated by the fact that when we see a table to have a certain width, we do not see it as having a certain width in inches, say, as opposed to centimetres. This too is explained by the distinction between the ways of characterizing a scenario and the scenario itself. Suppose we prescind here from qualifications about perceptual acuity. Then we can say that one and the same restriction on the distance between the sides of the table, one and the same restriction on the ways in which the space around the perceiver can be filled consis- tently with the experience being fully veridical, is given by doing these two things: saying that the sides are 39.4 inches apart, and saying that they are 100 centimetres apart. The same point also goes for directions and the units in which they may be measured.

Now let us return to transcendental arguments. The transcendental argument I will be suggesting has as its point of application certain features of the scenario of an experience. The transcendental argument is truth- directed, and has this as its conclusion: that the scenario contents of some experiences are, in part, perceptual (and a fortiori correct). The argument can be divided into a posi- tive phase and a critical phase.

The positive phase concerns the role of states with scenario contents. It is distinctive of this class of states that one of them must be implicated when a subject perceives something or other to be in a certain direction from him, or a certain distance, and for that reason does something explicable in terms which relate him to that very direction, or distance. Examples of this include such fundamental abilities as that of seeing something to be a certain distance, and therefore moving one’s hand that far to grasp it, or

transcendental arguments 13

seeing something threatening to be approaching from a certain direction, and so moving in the opposite direction. The descriptions under which the actions are made rational in these examples are ones that relate the actions to the sub- ject’s immediate spatial environment. Though an experi- ence may misrepresent the scene around a perceiver, this kind of role in explanation of an action rationally explicable by reference to its spatial environmental relations must be at least a possible role for perceptual experiences with scenario spatial contents.

The critical phase of the argument presses the following question. If an experience with a spatial, scenario content is not perceptual, why is it correct to say its contents concern one set of egocentrically identified distances and directions, rather than another? This is a question concerning the scenario allegedly presented by such experiences. We can make the question more specific. Why, in the circumstances envisaged, is it correct to take an experience as representing the existence of various features, surfaces, and solids as at various distances and directions, rather than as represent.- ing the same features &c. as at angles rotated around the direction of straight ahead by a certain quantity? This is not a verificationist question. It is rather a question about what it is for one scenario rather than another to be the content of an experience.8

We can conceive of two ways in which the question might be answered. But what is crucial is that both ways of answer- ing involve commitment to the proposition that the scenario contents of experiences are sometimes at least par- tially veridical. One way to answer is to say that a given sub- ject’s illusions are of the same conscious type as certain other experiences enjoyed by that same subject. This then

8 An argument pressing this question is reminiscent of what in earlier work I called the ‘switching’ tactic in applying the Discrimination Principle. See ‘The Limits of Intelligibility’, Philosophical Review, 97 (1988), 463–96. In fact in the pre- sent case the tactic is applied to a nonconceptual content: see further below.

transcendental arguments 14

allows one to say that one assignment of distances and direc- tions to the scenario presented in the experiences is correct because the other, genuinely perceptual, experiences men- tioned in the answer can explain actions in relation to one set of egocentric directions and distances in the perceiver’s environment, and not in relation to another. Quite diffe- rent spatial actions would have been forthcoming if the scenarios presented had been systematically switched in respect of distances and/or directions represented.

The other way to answer is one which allows that a sequ- ence of nonperceptual experiences with scenario contents may even exhaust the experiences of a given subject. Under this way, the question pressed in the critical phase of the argument is answered by saying that the experiences in the sequence are of the same conscious kind as those of experi- ences in other human subjects. These latter experiences in turn present one scenario rather than another in virtue of the environmental descriptions under which they are capa- ble of explaining their subjects’ actions. Again, this answer evidently relies on the supposition that not all experiences with scenario contents are wholly non-perceptual. The ans- wer requires that there be a range of experiences with spa- tial contents, which are implicated in the production of spa- tial behaviour that is, in the context of the subject’s other states, made rational by those spatial contents.

Our question is: if hallucination is universal, what makes it correct to assign one set of directions to the features in the scenario of an experience, rather than a variant. assignment of directions uniformly rotated a certain angle about the origin? Perhaps an answer to this question would exist if we could distinguish correct from incorrect ways of hooking up the alleged experiences to the limbs involved in spatial actions. But the supposition of universal hallucination seems to leave us without a basis for the distinction between right and wrong linkages. In more common circumstances

transcendental arguments 15

than universal hallucination, a correct linkage is one that gives an experience the relations to spatial action one would expect on the basis of the experience’s own relations to other experiences, which in turn are suitably tied to spatial abilities. Thus we have no difficulty in saying why one rather than another family of links is correct for someone who cannot act within a certain range of angles to his body, but can nevertheless perceive things there. But any basis of this general kind is, in the nature of the case, lacking if hal- lunication is universal.

These considerations go beyond a mere insistence that the spatial contents of experiences are constitutively linked with the intentions (or subintentional states) to which they give rise in the presence of other attitudes.9 For the relevant intentions or subintentional states themselves have an egocentric spatial content. So the above considerations can be applied to them too. In the case of universal hallucina- tion, what would make it true that an intention has an egocentric content involving one direction, rather than a rotational variant? We could go through arguments for intentions (or subintentional states) corresponding to those we just gave for experiences. This highlights the fact that the present arguments tie spatial content not just to inten- tions, but to real spatial changes such as bodily movement. The existence of alleged universal illusions of action would not suffice to meet the challenge in question.

Suppose a theorist accepts these arguments, but insists that nevertheless in the case of universal hallucination, there is still a fact of the matter as to which assignment of egocentric directions is correct for the scenario of an experience. This theorist thereby violates the Discrimina- tion Principle, applied to the contents of experience. If such

9 The reasons for preferring to speak of subintentional states are given in B. O’Shaughnessy’s ‘The sub-intentional act’, ch. 10 of vol. II of The Will (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

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a theorist were right, there would be no account to be given which distinguishes what it is for experience to have one spatial content rather than another.

As so often when making a regulative use of the Discrimi- nation Principle, these considerations have an open-ended character. They certainly do not prove that no other answers to our question are possible; rather, they have shown that the plausible answers support the conclusion of the transcendental argument. The argument is, then, that given the premiss that there are experiences with scenario contents, we can argue that not all such experiences are wholly nonperceptual; some of them are perceptual, and some of their contents must be (at least partially) correct. But the argument requires a series of comments.

(a) It may be tempting to argue that since I can imagine all of my own experiences to be nonperceptual, there is no obs- tacle to imagining that. die same may be true of everybody else simultaneously—and so the transcendental argument just offered must be unsound. But of course that does not suffice to establish the unsoundness of the argument if some of our actual experiences with scenario contents are perceptual. If they are, then the scenarios they present are anchored to the real spatial world. That anchoring helps to determine which scenarios are presented by experiences. We may, perhaps, then go on to conceive of other worlds in which all such experiences are nonperceptual. But in answering the question of why it is that the experiences pre- sent one scenario rather than another, we would refer back to the real-world relations of experiences of the same kind in the actual world. If the objector’s claim about imaginabil- ity is correct, it does not show the transcendental argument to be unsound.

(b) When we think of putative cases of universal halluci- nation, our first reaction, given the philosophical tradition, is to think of a subject deceived by Descartes’ evil demon, or

transcendental arguments 17

to think of a brain in a vat. But, an objector may protest, a subject can be under a total illusion whilst having a properly functioning motor system. The objector may continue by saying that the fact that the totally deluded subject sees something frightening to be in one direction rather than another can be reflected in his moving in the opposite direc- tion. The objector may wonder whether we may not elabo- rate and extend such a case so that the spatial content of the subject’s illusions is properly grounded in facts about his dispositions to spatial behaviour. I agree that we might pos- sibly do this. But it is no counterexample to the conclusion of the transcendental argument. We can make such an extended and elaborated case coherent only if we allow that the subject is able on the whole to keep track of the positions of his limbs relative to the rest of his body. Though there are not in general sensations of position, a conscious aware- ness of the position of one’s limbs is certainly part of ordi- nary human consciousness. If the extended example is to be elaborated, it seems that this awareness has to be verdical (and caused by feedback mechanisms). The subject has to move his body and limbs systematically in response to the content of his illusions, and keep track of the position of his limbs after any movements. If the example is to be convinc- ing, it cannot just be luck that he moves his limbs in a way appropriate to the content of the illusion. The subject’s total conscious states would, then, in a coherent development of the case, not be illusory in all respects. We can certainly draw conclusions, if these considerations are right, from premisses about the spatial content of the experiences to conclusions that entail propositions about the mind-inde- pendent world; the conclusions in question are those about the body-relative location of the subject’s limbs. The criter- ion I adopted for an argument to be transcendental is met.

(c) I have been tacitly working with an oversimplification, which should now be removed. So far I have considered

transcendental arguments 18

only perceivers who, when functioning properly, have limbs they can control. But it seems that we could develop a coherent story of a spherical organism or device, with a spherical light-sensitive surface. This organism does not have limbs, and is incapable of moving any part of its own body; rather it is passively moved within a fluid environ- ment. Its actions are not bodily movements. Its actions might include, for instance, altering the chemical proper- ties of its surface. Yet it seems that this organism could still have perceptual experiences. The scenarios of these experiences would have labelled origins and axes. But the labels of the axes would mention mere bodily parts, rather than limbs. If such a being can indeed have experiences with scenario-involving contents, we have to say how the present transcendental argument can be applied to it. Otherwise it will just be a counterexample: for this imagined organism is incapable of any of the bodily actions that have played so large a role in the argument so far.

There is a necessary property of scenarios we have not yet touched upon. Perceptual states with scenario-involving contents have to play a certain role in the spatial reasoning that leads to the construction by the subject of a cognitive map of his immediate environment (perceived and unper- ceived). It is arguable that the content of the map is also nonconceptual. If it is, then we could expect spatial reason- ing involving the scenario to exploit a basic relation of con- sistency of a map with a particular scenario, under a given assignment of a real location and a set of directions to the scenario’s origin and labelled axes. Such consistency means that there is a way of filling out the mapped space that meets two conditions. When the space is filled out in that way, it instantiates at least one of the ways of filling out that space given in the map; and it also instantiates one of the ways constituting the scenario (under the given assignment to the origin and axes). Building up a cognitive map is a matter

transcendental arguments 19

of constructing a map from the subject’s stream of experi- ences and other information, under the regulative require- ment that this sort of consistency be preserved. The spher- ical organism too can do this. Its behaviour, even if only chemical rather than spatial, can be explained, in the pre- sence of its cognitive map and other states, by the fact that it is at one place rather than another. In this sense, its behaviour is still explicable under spatial descriptions that relate it to its spatial environment.

(d) I said that the transcendental argument would be based on considerations in the theory of content. Isn’t the theory of content a theory of the level of sense, rather than reference? Yet one of the applications of the Discrimination Principle was made to the directions themselves, which are at the level of reference, not sense. Is there some slippage here?

There is no slippage. The Discrimination Principle is just as compelling for the scenario contents of experience as it is for conceptual contents. If we construe certain psychologi- cal states as relations to entities of some sort, we must not select as relata entites so finely sliced that no account is pos- sible of what distinguishes standing in the given relation to one of these entities, rather than another. I have been argu- ing that one kind of content of experience is given by rela- tions to spatial types which, when instantiated, restrict what is in a given egocentric direction. Applying a switching argument amongst such spatial types is, then, potentially a legitimate means of establishing a violation of the Discrimi- nation Principle.

What the query about slippage does succeed in bringing out is an important difference. On the theory of content I endorse, a concept is individuated by the correct account of what it is to possess it. But it would be absurd to say that a spatial type, a scenario, is fundamentally individuated by something to do with thinkers or perceivers. On the con-

transcendental arguments 20

trary, it is meant to be a notion of type which can be instan- tiated by some portion of the real world. It is in part because this is so that we can hope to individuate some concepts by their relations to perceptual states with contents given in part by scenarios, and in doing so to individuate concepts in part by their possessors’ relations to their environments. Certainly we still need a substantive account of what it is to be in a perceptual state with a content given by a scenario. It is just that such accounts will, in mentioning scenarios, use ontology not proprietary to perception, whereas accounts of concepts will be using an ontology proprietary to propositional attitude psychology.

In any case, even at the level of conceptual content, con- siderations at the level of sense necessarily have some impact on theory at the level of reference. This is because any genuine sense must be such that there is an account of what has to be the case (perhaps in a given context) for something to be the referent of that sense. This is the requirement that underlies Michael Dummett’s insistence that grasping a sense is knowing the condition for some- thing to be its referent.10 It is the requirement that in earlier work I formulated as the demand that the possession condi- tion for a sense must allow an account to be given of how the reference is determined (again perhaps in context) from the possession condition.11 The considerations above in support of the transcendental argument can be taken as considerations in favour of the following point: that under the supposition of universal hallucination, no account is possible of how a demonstrative sense such as “that dis- tance” or “that direction” succeeds in latching on to one dis-

10 The point is made in Michael Dummett’s Frege: Philosophy of Language (Lon- don: Duckworth, 1973), and its significance emphasized in The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1981).

11 ‘What Are Concepts?’, in Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Lan- guage II (Midwest Studies in Philosophy 1989), ed. H. Wettstein, T. Uehling, and P. French.

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tance or direction rather than another. According to those considerations, if the conclusion of the transcendental argument were false, then no account would be possible of the conditions under which the alleged senses determine, even in a given context, one reference rather than another.

The application of the Discrimination Principle in the transcendental argument is somewhat different from the applications I made of it in earlier work. In the present case, the legitimacy of the referents in question—i.e. the dis- tances, directions, and the rest—is not in question, whereas the legitimacy of absolute locations or of unknowable sub- jective experiences was certainly being questioned in the applications developed in the earlier work. In the present case we have rather an example of the use of a tactic to argue that under a certain conception, we cannot, whilst respecting the Discrimination Principle, give an account of what relations the alleged senses have to bear to a quite kosher domain.

(e) The points I have just made in (d) aim to establish that in the alleged case of universal hallucination, it will not have been fixed how the world has to be for the alleged contents to be correct. The case can be contrasted with that of hal- lucinations which occur in the actual world, and result in attempts at perceptual-demonstrative thoughts which fail to refer. There is still a contrast here even if we hold the view of Gareth Evans and John McDowell that when a per- son has a hallucination as of an apple in front of him, there is no corresponding sense (mode of presentation) of the form ‘that apple’.12 Under the Evans–McDowell view, there remains a condition which is the one that would have to be met for there to exist a perceptual-demonstrative sense of the type the thinker attempts to employ, viz. that in the

12 Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), and John McDowell, ‘Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space’, in Subject, Thought and Context, ed. J. McDowell and P. Pettit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

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given context, there occurs to the subject a genuinely per- ceptual experience of the subjective sort actually enjoyed. But in the alleged case in which all experiences with scenario contents are nonperceptual, the burden of the argument has been that no condition of correctness has been fixed which would allow us to say how the world has to be for a perceptual-demonstrative based on the alleged experiences to refer.

iv

I now turn to consider the bearing of the argument I have been developing upon some other well-known positions.

Hillary Putnam argued that a permanently envatted brain cannot think that it is a brain in a vat.13 Against this, Thomas Nagel wrote

I can use a term which fails to refer, provided I have a conception of the conditions under which it would refer—as when I say there are no ghosts. To show that I couldn’t think there were no trees if there were none, it would have to he shown that this thought could not be accounted for in more basic terms which would be available to me even if all my impressions of trees had been artifi- cially produced.14

Nagel overlooks a strong intuition that thinking that there are plants of a natural kind with a certain characteristic shape and set of properties falls short. of thinking that there are trees; and it seems that the latter can be done only by someone with the right causal relations to trees. That,

13 Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

14 Thomas Nagel The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 72.

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though, is not the point I want to highlight here. I want to question, rather, whether the ‘more basic terms’ which Nagel says he wants to use to formulate the thought—even if it is only a thought about tree-like things—will he availa- ble to a thinker in the case in which the scenario contents of experiences are universally nonperceptual.

Presumably possession of a characteristic three-dimen- sional shape would be included in the more basic terms with which Nagel intends to account for the concept ‘tree’. But the concept of something’s having a certain shape, as used by Nagel here, is, I would argue, a concept individuated in part by the restrictions it imposes on the scenario content. of experience of one who correctly perceives something of that shape from a suitable distance and orientation. We are concerned here with concepts of shapes, of course, rather than the shapes themselves (for which individuation in per- ceptual terms would be absurd). To say that the concept is individuated in part by these restrictions on the scenario content of experience is not to say that a thinker has to have thought about them. A logical concept is arguably indi- viduated in part by certain inferential transitions having instances that are found primitively compelling by any thinker who possesses the concept. The thinker just has to find the instances compelling, and not necessarily to have theorized about them, or even to have thought about their common form. The corresponding point is true of percep- tual shape concepts individuated in part by their links with scenarios. A simple account might, for example, propose the following as necessary for possession of the perceptual concept square. Suppose a thinker is taking his experiences at face value. Suppose too that in all the ways comprising the scenario of his experience, the area of space apparently occupied by a given perceptually presented object is square. Then, this simple account suggests, the thinker must find the present-tense demonstrative thought that that object is

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square to be primitively compelling. This simple account is not circular. It uses the concept square in fixing a certain sort of scenario. As I emphasized earlier, that does not require the thinker to possess the concept square.15

Now the argument of the preceding section was precisely that in the alleged case in which the scenario contents of experience are never perceptual, we cannot make sense of the idea that experiences have one scenario content rather than another.16 So a subject allegedly having such experi- ences would not be in those states with which connections are required if he is to possess concepts of three-dimen- sional shapes. Hence he would not have the particular spa- tial concepts at the more basic level that Nagel hoped to employ. So much at the conceptual level is individuated ultimately by reference to its connections with the level of the nonconceptual representational content of experience that once that. lower level is removed, little if anything can remain at the conceptual level.17

These remarks on Nagel point up the significance of the fact that arguments based on the Discrimination Principle sustain conclusions at the level of sense, and not just at the level of reference. Donald Davidson writes, in an argument that has certain affinities with Putnam’s, that ‘we must . . .

15 In the terminology of ‘What Are Concepts?’, this simple partial account could be written in what is there called the A(C) form. This simple account is overly simple, even for the particular case it treats; for further details, see ‘Scenarios, Concepts and Perception’. But it is plausible that improvements would consist in refining its basic idea, rather than jettisoning it.

16 I explicitly considered only variant contents that involved rotating the spatial features some degrees about one labelled axis. But there will be other variants to which the argument can be applied which do not at all preserve apparent shape.

17 These remarks should not be taken to imply that I object in general to Nagel’s views on the intelligibility of scepticism. On the contrary, restrictions in the formu- lation of the transcendental argument I have endorsed leave plenty of footholds to establish the intelligibility of interesting forms of scepticism. The argument does not exclude the possibility of a person’s experiences becoming non-veridical through envatment of his brain after a period of normal perception of the exter- nal world. I have not even excluded permanent envatment, as long as this is not the position of all humans.

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take the objects of a belief to be the causes of that belief.18 Such points, even if they are completely compelling, give us only conclusions about reference and not sense. If the defender of such arguments is to have a reply to all of Nagel’s points, he needs to be able to extend them to the realm of sense too. The Discrimination Principle allows him to do so.

Finally I return to Peter Strawson’s central argument in the section of The Bounds of Sense entitled ‘Unity and Objec- tivity’.19 With vast oversimplification, we can say that Straw- son develops an argument to the effect that the possibility of thinking of experience as experience requires, on the part of the subject, the employment, in judgements of experience, of concepts of the objective world.20 Actually Strawson’s argument appears to assume that any subject who has experiences also possesses the concept of experi- ence. If this assumption is false, then saving the possibility of thought about experience may involve much more than saving the possibility of experience itself. I will not pursue this point, as it has been considered by others.21 What I do want to consider is the relation between Strawson’s conclu- sion and that for which I have been arguing. There is a minor difference, and a major difference.

The minor difference is that Strawson regarded his con- clusion as excluding the possibility of a total sequence of experiences of a given subject which is exclusively of the sort envisaged by ‘the sense-datum theorist’. We can take such experiences as experiences whose conscious, subjec-

18 Donald Davidson, ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, repr. in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. E. LePore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 317–18.

19 The section in question is on pp. 97–112. 20 This formulation is drawn from p. 111 of The Bounds of Sense, where Straw-

son says he is giving the argument ‘in its boldest possible form’. 21See for instance R. Harrison in ‘Strawson on Outer Objects’, Philosophical

Quarterly, 20 (1970), 219–20.

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tive properties are given only by nonrepresentational prop- erties.22 Since my argument here has dealt only with rep- resentational content, it does not exclude the possibility of such a total sequence of experiences.23

The major difference from Strawson’s view is rather one that remains even when we bracket the gap between having experiences and having the capacity for thought about one’s own experiences. Strawson’s conclusion can be sum- marized thus: conceiving of one’s own experiences requires conceiving of an objective world whose existence is inde- pendent of an experience of it. But as Strawson’s own cauti- ous summary of his conclusion makes clear, his arguments do not ensure that the experiences the subject takes, on occasion, as experiences of an objective world really are so. Strawson writes that ‘some . . . members of the series [of experiences] are conceptualized in such a way that they fit together to form a coherent picture of an objective world’ (p. 103). So his arguments may establish that the picture must be of a certain kind, but not that it accurately depicts anything. This apparent gap could be closed by some extreme forms of phenomenalism or verificationism. But these would he as alien to Peter Strawson as they are to

22 The ‘sensational properties’ of my Sense and Content (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

23 More generally, if there are sensational properties at all, I do not know of any argument which excludes the possibility which Strawson took his reasoning to exclude. Of course a total sequence of experiences with only sensational proper- ties could not be conceptualized as such by their owner; but it is not required to be so. The sensational properties must also be conceived by us in a way that does not make them vulnerable to sound forms of the private language argument; but it is arguable that such conceptions are available. See for instance the treatment of definitional and cognitive priority in Sense and Content, and the discussion in my ‘Consciousness and Other Minds’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume), 1984. We should not exclude the possibility that a satisfac- tory evolutionary theory of the mind together with a neuropsychology of more primitive species will identify a species that enjoys experiences with only sensa- tional properties. I say this whole issue is minor, though, because the thesis that there are sensational properties of experience is certainly not obviously essential to every theory of content in which the Discrimination Principle is embedded.

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many other present-day philosophers, and certainly to any- one sympathetic to the general approach to content I have been following. If, though, we accept the transcendental argument based on the Discrimination Principle, the appa- rent gap in question is never allowed to open up in the first place. For an experience to have a fine-grained spatial rep- resentational content, given by a scenario, it has already to be a type related in various complex ways to the spatial, objective, mind-independent world. To suppose there is always a gap to be bridged is to be subject to another of those illusions which can be dispelled by an adequate theory of content.