Meeting Notes 11/3/10

1Q) Where did we leave of on the question of whether perceptual experiences have propositional contents?

1A) It seems uncontroversial to say that experiences have contents, in the sense that they tell us things. (And in the sense that verbs like "see" take direct objects.) But this is only neutral if we don't take "content" to simply be synonymous with "propositional content"; for example, Ming vases can tell us things about their owners, but Ming vases don't have propositional content. For sentences with perceptual verbs, we often have bare infinite complements, as in

John saw Mary cry. ["bare infinitive complement" for the verb "see"]

semanticists have proposed that the semantic value [[Mary cry]] could be: an event (Davidson, Higginbotham '93) or a situation (Moltmann.) Analyzing such locutions was a project of situation semantics. Ordinary English usage for the variety of verbs of experience is very wide here; the landscape of ordinary language is not nearly as uniform here as it is in e.g. the case of "believes" and the related family of doxastic verbs. Also, it is worth keeping in mind that our project is not first and foremost to give a correct semantics for e.g. "see"; it is to get at what "sees" and "looks"-statements are getting at.

2Q) LOT. When I tried to articulate a ''contextualist" response to Hellie's claim that exact-ers (ppl who think we perceive colors exactly but "shiftily"--e.g. Jackson and Pinkerton) are saddled with "slight nonveridicality" in experiences, MM asked me what in the story was supposed to be the analog of e.g. "red_29", the predicate that applies to patch b in context 1 but not in context 2. He suggested that the answer might be the syntactic token "red_29" in a LOT.

Why would one endorse a LOT? (Other than wanting to be a contextualist on the pattern of contextualists about natural language predicates?) I asked:

2.5Q) Could perceptual constancy be marshalled as data supporting such a view? ...Siegel so suggests in the SEP. A view would go something like this: the experience of a sunlight-dappled gray cabinet presents us with the same nominatum (the grayness of the cabinet) under different modes of presentation (the lighter or darker 'color' patches in our visual field, which help communicate to us that there is a uniformly colored gray cabinet before us.)

2A) Yes, that is how LOT could function here.

2.5A) Nonono! This is gravely confused. First of all, a LOT would most naturally be used to get *rid* of the need to make a Fregean sense-reference distinction amongst the contents of perception. The purpose of a Fregean sense-reference distinction is to explain how `a=a' is different from `a=b' *not in virtue of the sentences' syntactic features*:

"But this relation would hold between the names or signs only in so far as they named or designated something. It would be mediated by the connexion of each of the two signs with the same designated thing. But this is arbitrary. Nobody can be forbidden to use any arbitrarily producible event or object as a sign for something. In that case the sentence a = b would no longer refer to the subject matter, but only to its mode of designation; we would express no proper knowledge by its means. But in many cases this is just what we want to do." (Frege, Sinn Bedeutung Paragraph I)

But if we avail ourselves of a LOT, the syntactic feature explanation becomes viable again, in which case the postulation of senses is threatened with redundancy.

Moreover: perceptual constancy is not the right kind of phenomenon to be doing the work of motivating a sense-reference distinction for perceptual content. What we need is: (i) an informative identity and an uninformative identity; (ii) a reason to think the informativeness of the informative identity cannot be explained in terms of sameness of denotation [for then there would be no difference between `a=a' and `a=b']; (iii) a reason to think the informativeness of the identity cannot be explained in terms of sameness of sign [Frege's gloss: signs may be used however we like; however, in the sense in which this is true, knowledge is not, in general, expressed by such usages...it is not as if we may create whatever knowledge we like by using signs however we like.] [my gloss: in addition, such an account could not explain why some nonequivalent strings--e.g. 'my cat', 'the cat that belongs to me'--*don't* express something cognitively significant when conjoined by '='. We need something that cuts finer than denotation but not so fine as signs or symbols.]

Perceptual constancy is a phenomenon whereby the color of the cabinet is perceived as unchanging. So it isn't clear that we do have an informative identity here. To wit: it's not clear we have an analog of the cognitively significant "a=b" (would it be "region 1 is the same color as region 2"?) as well as the cognitively insignificant "a=a" (would it be "region 1 is the same color as region 1"?)