Daniel Weger
Affiliation: Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main
Phenomenal structuralism claims that each phenomenal character is fully individuated in terms of its relations to other phenomenal characters. On this view, a red experience, for instance, is the very experience it is in virtue of its relations to other color experiences: It is more similar to an orange experience than to a yellow experience, more similar to a purple experience than to a blue experience, most dissimilar to a green experience, and so on. This conflicts with the widely held view of phenomenal intrinsicalism, which maintains that phenomenal character is an intrinsic affair. According to intrinsicalists, what it is like to undergo a particular experience is purely a matter of that experience’s intrinsic properties. While they generally accept that experiences stand in relations of similarity and dissimilarity in virtue of their phenomenal character, they deny that we can individuate phenomenal character solely on the basis of these relations.
Rather than offering another direct argument for phenomenal structuralism, the aim of this talk is to develop an error theory about intrinsicalism. The core idea is that intrinsicalist intuitions are fundamentally mistaken. The key task, then, is to explain how we come to endorse these intuitions, why we hold onto them, and why they are nevertheless mistaken. To this end, I will appeal to several considerations and point out how they account for the persistence of intrinsicalist intuitions. Among the most important considerations are the following ones:
First, when we are introspectively aware of our experiences, we usually get the impression that they are independent of one another and self-contained in the sense that it seems possible that we could just have had that single experience. In other words, it seems that this experience and what it is like is to have it is wholly independent of all the other experiences we happen to have. The same impression may arise as a result of remembering experiences. However, it is not at all clear whether the idea of having just a single experience is intelligible and whether we could tell what it is like to have such an experience in isolation. Moreover, there is no guarantee that either introspection or memory or both reveal the deep metaphysical nature of experience and its phenomenal character to us.
Second, it is cognitively more efficient to treat phenomenal properties, i.e., the properties that are presented in experience and determine what it is like to have that experience, such as redness or greenness, as non-relational properties. Our cognitive systems tend to favor simplicity, which often leads us to conceptualize properties as self-contained rather than relational. For instance, we naturally conceive of mass as an intrinsic property of objects, even though modern physics tells us that it is a relational property that depends on gravitational interactions. Nevertheless, the belief that mass is an intrinsic property does not interfere with our ability to successfully navigate our environment. Similarly, treating phenomenal properties as intrinsic allows us to deal with our experiences in a straightforward way that might be hindered by treating them as relational properties. Still, the fact that we can get around by treating phenomenal properties as intrinsic does not show that this belief is true, but merely that it is reliable.
Third, linguistic behavior further reinforces the impression that phenomenal character is intrinsic. The way we describe experiences in everyday language suggests that phenomenal properties are self-contained properties rather than relational ones. “Red”, “squeaky”, and “fruity”, for example, seem to denote intrinsic properties of the experienced objects. This mirrors similar tendencies in other domains of language use. For example, we commonly describe objects as “big”, “expensive”, or “delicious”, as if these were intrinsic properties of the objects of which they are predicated. However, something is only big, expensive, or delicious relative to a specific reference class of objects. In much the same way, when we talk about phenomenal character, our linguistic habits might lead us astray regarding its nature. While this is not to say that “red”, “squeaky”, and “fruity” denote relational properties, as is the case with “big”, “expensive”, and “delicious”, it is far from clear that they denote intrinsic properties.
Taken together, these considerations provide an error-theoretic account of phenomenal intrinsicalism. They can explain the intuitive appeal of phenomenal intrinsicalism, but, as I argue, they do not provide conclusive support for accepting this view. The upshot is that phenomenal intrinsicalism is much less plausible than it is commonly taken to be. This clears the way for a less presuppositional approach to theorizing about the nature of phenomenal character in general, and phenomenal structuralism in particular.