Consciousness, Color, and Content (Representation and Mind)

Rating:
Summary: Good defence of representationalism
Review: This book is a good, but not introductory defence of representationalism. Tye is one of the big upholders of this view in the philosophy of mind, among others like Dretske and Shoemaker. Seager wrote a good introduction to representationalism (theories of consicousness). This book has three parts. The first deals with the explanatory gap and the knowledge argument. Tye considers an objection to the knowledge argument but finds it inadequate, so he proposes that colorblind mary lacks certain phenomenal concepts, and that therefore naturalism rests untouched. I think the knowledge argument, although still vey popular, is open to many objections, and this one is as good as many others. Tye then dismisses explanatory gap fears as cognitive illusions, and here I also agree, although I am more inclined to David Panpineaus thoughts on the matter.

In the second section, Tye gives a quick outline of his version of representationalsim, listing the conditions necesary for a representation to be phenomenal, and then defends his theory against all kinds of objections. I see no flaws in his arguments, but remain puuzzled about some aspects of representationalism in general. For example it is not clear to me whether Tye holds that physical makeup determines pheneomenal content, but he seems not to. If so, then it is strange to note that it seems quite obvious that what does the representing is the brain, and it certainly is functionally determined by physical makeup. This is not denying externalism, which is another matter altogether. The other thing is that it is also not clear at all how exactly representationalism explains qualia in a "deeper" way than, say, higher order thought dispositional theories. To say that phenomenal content is representational content of some kind, and that the qualities are of objects and not experiences, does not explain why the qualia are the way they are, it only says that they are the way they are because thats how they are on external objects. I guess im not convinced because I simply cannot get over the intuition that experiences also have something to do with qualitative contents. Achromatosia or akinesia seems to affect experience, not merely the representation of external objects qualities, for example. Although representationalism is neturalist-friendly, it also is friendly to some anti-physicalist thesis, and this makes me unconfortable. I also cannot agree to the metaphysical possibility of zombies, for example.

The last section of the book deals with a representationalist view of color, that mainly argues for externalism, where I see no real problem, and with the existence of consciousness across the phylogenetic scale. Here one sees that Tyes PANIC theory seems to be a good enough measure for phenomenal consicousness, and I really cannot say I am troubled by the idea that many species, even insects, have some phenomenal content, given of course that this content is also scaled acording to complexity. That is, honeybees may have phenomenal content, but it must be extremely limited and uninteresting, something we would not recognize as phenomenal at all, probably.

This is a good book for someone who is not a beginner in philosophy, there is complex argumentation, but anyone would probably get the main points and find them interesting. Representationalism is relatively a conservative philosophy for the problem of consicousness, and it seems plausible and a good candidate for explaining qualia. The only reason to adopt this position over others, like plain identity theory, functionalism, biological neuturalism, or whatever, is that it can deal adequately with qualia and remain neturalistic. Time will tell wether it is this theory that will turn out to be right, but this is unlikely, considering the history of philosophy.