Sorry for the long delay now back to regularly scheduled philosophical programming.

So from several quarters lately the question of what it means for a perception to have content. Not only did the issue come up in the Working group in the philosophy of mind, and in Searle’s seminar on Language and Consciousness but separately a girl I’m seeing asked me the same question. I figured this meant I really should write a blog post on the subject but every time I thought I had a handle on the subject I would learn yet another subtlety of the issue. I’m still far from an expert, and this post could turn out to just be deeply misguided, but I wanted to get my thoughts out here and see what people think. The arguments that have motivated my thoughts on these matters are mainly the things we have been reading in Searle’s seminar this term: Dretske’s “The Intentionality of Perception” found as chapter 7 in the book John Searle edited by Barry Smith, Searle’s book Intentionality, McDowell’s piece “Intentionality De Re” in Searle and His Critics as well as Searle’s reply in that same book. Plus of course general background from Chomsky and one other article of his (I am in the process or reading) which I will cite later. Though motivated by these pieces I assure everyone my thoughts are entirely my own and no one else should be held responsible for any mistakes (or brilliant new observations) I make.

The first difficulty in deciphering what it might mean for a perception (say the visual experience of looking at an olympic figure skater) to have content is defining what we mean by content. Unfortunately doing this in any generality is beyond the scope of this post and quite possibly a hopeless endeavor, i.e., there are several different things we mean by content. So we can get on to the real meat of this issue let me gesture in the direction of what it means to have content by saying that a perception that has content represents the world as being a certain way. So one way of having content might be to have an attached proposition, or to have something like Searle’s conditions of satisfaction. Whatever the mechanism for a perception to have content it must be possible for that perception to be mistaken not merely misleading. So an uninterpreted picture can not have content, it may be taken from a strange angle which encourages people to draw incorrect conclusions or even be a picture of something physically impossible but absent interpretation it is just colors on paper and doesn’t represent the world to be any particular way (this is not to assume that a picture plus certain customs/practices/context/observation might not have content).

So at this point it might seem fairly obvious what it means to say a perception has content. A perception has content if it represents the world to be a certain way and as a purely linguistic analysis this may be correct. However, arguments like the one between Dretske and Searle over whether perception has content are meant to be substantive not merely linguistic differences over where to draw the line between perception and belief. At first glance, however, it seems difficult to see how any reasonable philosophical view could not be made compatible with either option (perception has/doesn’t have content) by slightly shifting this line between perception and belief.

No philosophical view is going to deny that my perception of the olympic figure skater almost immediately produces beliefs (that girl is really flexible, that trick is amazing). Nor is any reasonable philosophical view going to deny that if I had seen this same image in a different state and hadn’t generated those beliefs there would still be something in common between my two visual experiences. Yet now if I define perception to include those beliefs which are quickly generated (maybe not those examples) it would seem that perception has content but if I define perception to be those properties (in the metaphysical sense of things in virtue of which entities are similar) of my experience in common between viewings of the same light input to my retina it would seem that perception does not have content. So if we wish to retain the idea that arguments over whether perception has content are substantive we are going to have to do a bit better.

Having thought about the issue for awhile, and considered what the various philosophers mentioned at the beginning have said, I’ve come up with several possible interpretations for the substantive content behind the statement “perceptions have content.” Importantly when I talk about different viewings of the same image with different content I mean a hypothetical comparison between two situations where the same photons hit your eye but you end up representing the world in different fashions. In other words something like the face/vase figure-ground example but with actual differing content, i.e., you actually represent the world as showing you a vase in one case and a face in the other.

1. There is some meaningful (nonlinguistic) notion of what it means to be the same experience and “perceptions have content” asserts that there are no distinct experiences which don’t have content. Or in other words there is no one sort of experience we could point to that (like sense data) stays the same between viewings of the same image with different content.
2. The visual ‘image’ we have in our mind is genuinely different depending on the content we assign the perception and there is nothing else we can separate out we could call the ‘image’ that does remain the same. In other words if we were asked to describe the colors, curves, etc.. that we see our answer would be different depending on what content we ascribe to our perception of the image. Interestingly there is some scientific evidence for this sort of thing.
3. Seeing the same image with different content is very qualitatively different
4. The things which two viewings of the same image with differing content have in common are not a natural kind.
5. While their may be experiential components (or sub-experiences or something) which are in common between viewings of the same image with different content the content of our visual perception does not ‘rest on top’ of these components, i.e., the content and the ‘mental image’ are presented to our consciousness ‘at the same level.’
6. It is somehow impossible (physically? logically?) to have any visual experience with some associated content (this might be trivial content like “this is an image”)

I’m sure there are some possible interpretations I’m missing and I would love to hear other ideas people have. I suspect Searle means something like 1, 2 or 3 (though would probably agree with all except the last two) but I’m not entirely sure. At the very least I hope this post convinces people that the notion of perception having content needs more elucidation.

One interesting consequence of the idea that the statement “perception has content” should not merely be a statement about how we use language is that the content in question cannot be provided by some kind of simplistic content externalism. Active content externalism as Clark and Chalmers discuss in The Extended Mind which suggests that the supervenience basis of experience actually extends outside the brain and thus different objects which produce the exact same neuronal response in your brain may still cause different sorts of experience could still make this statement have substantial content. However, if by content we merely mean some linguistic tradition which tells us how to map certain personal/intentional states out onto the world almost by definition this is going to make the truth of the statement merely depend on how we use language. Of course you may not find this sort of ‘failure to be substantive’ problematic but it deserves point out that the notion of substantive I am using here rules it out from the get go.

I can’t help shake the feeling that this post may be kinda hard to understand. Maybe I will take any feedback I get and try to put things in a bit more coherent fashion in a couple days. At the very least I hope to come back and discuss some pluses and minuses for the various interpratations soon.