Perry vs. Blackburn on "Thought Without Representation"

In my last (and first) paper on imagination, I wondered:

Does the “fully completed” content of (1): "Lo! A lemon" entail that here is a lemon here, a lemon now, or a lemon in the actual world? Each of these additions seems to give counterintuitive modal properties to the content of my experience—intuitively, I could have had the same perceptual experience in another place, or at another time, or if the history of the world had been slightly different. Yet there must be some way of completing the content which gives my perceptual experience truth-conditions, and there is pressure [from semantics, incl. Kaplanian semantics] to include all these parameters in order to fully specify the truth-conditions of any proposition. The solution may involve a kind of implicit propositional completion for (1)—a kind of “unrepresented content.”

Perry seems to have two views on how to do this in "Thought Without Representation." He says of someone who can think modally, temporally, or locationally shifted thoughts that their utterances are expressions of thoughts with implicit contents. Of speakers who cannot think modally--for example, the Z-landers who have no words or thoughts regarding places other than their home--that they have thoughts without representation. (At least, I'm sure this is what Blackburn thinks Perry says. I should re-read Perry's own words.) Blackburn counters that for these cases, there is a basic predicament of indeterminacy of translation, which doesn't have much to do with semantic theories or the bouquet of parameters the initializing of which interests semanticists so much.

This is certainly congenial from the viewpoint of the philosopher of language. Blackburn's reservations have to do with whether the analysis is faithful to something other than truth-conditions...something fuzzier, like the "what it's like" of thinking these thoughts. (Here, I take "what it's like" not phenomenologically, but with regards to how things are from the point of view of the agent insofar as he could use what he believes in reasoning. In this sense, believing that Hesperus is Hesperus has a different "what it's like" from believing that Hesperus is Phosphorus. Perhaps "cognitive significance" is the suitable label here.) I'm not sure what to call Blackburn's allegiance: to philosophy of mind, or Wittgenstein, or epistemology, or all of the above? You can't have everything. Perry is chiefly a philosopher of language with a philosophy of language concern.

Perry's bit does seem difficult to generalize for the case of perceptual contents, however. In my paper, I used [phi] as shorthand for the full "unfurled" perceptual-conceptual contents of Lo! A lemon, containing the requisite uncountably many shades of yellow an so forth. (Does this make me a state non/conceptualist? A content non/conceptualist? I'd better find out...) While I think I know what it means for someone to be able or unable to think (entertain) contents shifted in one or another parameter, I'm not sure I know what it means for someone to be un/able to entertain parameter-shifted perceptual contents. The location, in particular, is problematic, since perception represents lemons as being at certain locations "in the frame." If the lemon had been in another location in-the-frame, then the contents of [phi] would have been different. But we could move the whole shebang to Twin Earth (or just Twin Room, Twin Office, etc.) and nothing, er, qualitative would have been different. This seems sufficient to me to show that [phi] sets an "internal" location-parameter, but no "internal" experiencer-parameter, world-parameter, etc. All the rest of these are irrelevant to the modal profile of the experience.

One thing that is relevant here is whether there are special lemon de re thoughts. (Object-dependent thought). The reason is...not of enormous importance just yet...but it seeks to tweak our intuitions about whether we know the modal properties of our experiences, or our experience's contents. Now, being able to shift those parameters as I mentioned above while maintaining the "essential nature of the belief/experience" might wind up meaning my perception could go from veridical to falsidical without a change in its essential nature, ie, its being veridical is not essential to it. And this, of course, is something Campbell and the Disjunctivists would deny. (Tho I guess they have fancily different ways of doing so.)

Helpful MacFarlane quote:

One might respond to these considerations by bringing the world of the context of use into the content of Sam's thought. Intuitively, though, Sam could have had a thought with the very same content even if the world had been very different. Our ordinary ways of individuating thought contents do not support making the world of the context of use part of the content, except in exceptional circumstances. Moreover, bringing the world of the context into the content of Sam's thought would make this content a necessary truth about this possible world, rather than a contingent truth about the weather in Paris. (Nonindexical Contextualism, 16)

Riddle: is there a property I don't in fact have s.t. if I had it, I'd have it necessarily? Does the property of being veridical, predicated of a perceptual experience, have this property? If not, does anything? Current orthodoxy rules this out for epistemic modality, since the relation is taken to be an equivalence relation (therefore always symmetric.) Help. Help! HELP!!