Imagine you buy a gold ring which you later discover is not gold but only a convincing alloy. Since the ring looks gold, what makes it the case that it is not, after all, gold? There is little difficulty here: even though it looks gold, its chemical constitution marks it out as otherwise -- nitric acid fails to dissolve it.
For many philosophers, cases like this reveal deep and difficult problems about the nature of our minds and language: just as nothing the goldsmith says can make your ring gold, nor is it enough for your ring to be gold that it seems to be - what our experiences and words are about is determined, not by how things seem, but by how the world is. This much seems easy to accept, but from where things seem rest-assured of course, philosophy begins.
Unlike gold, there is no "acid test" to distinguish appearances from reality, so how do we know that what we experience is real? And even if we do experience the real, how can we be credited with knowledge of what our experiences are about? If what makes gold real involves its having a certain atomic number, then when I experience real gold, I fail to experience what it is that makes my experience an experience of gold. But then I fail to know what my experiences are about!
The first question is Descartes'. The second is characteristic of how philosophy of the second half of the last century came to regard the epistemic consequences of Descartes' findings. It acknowledged, with Descartes, that we cannot distinguish appearance from reality. Nonetheless it insisted, contra Descartes, that starting from the inside, to borrow Robert Stalknaker's idiom, gets the explanatory direction wrong -- reflection on how reality appears to us fails to disclose, not only how reality is, but what experience itself is. It is this latter thought, and the worry that attends it, that is at the heart of the dialectic in The Subject's Point of View: If the contents of our thoughts and experiences are determined by how the world is, then what our thoughts and experiences are about is external to us. But if what our thoughts and experiences are about is constitutive of them -- that is, if they have their identity in virtue of what they are about -- then, if we accept that thoughts and experiences are mental, as we surely ought to, then part of the mental nature of our thoughts is external to us. It is this consequence that Katalin Farkas finds intolerable. The Subject's Point of View is an elegant working out of her alternative.
The book is divided into two parts, the first providing a general motivation for the "uncomprisingly" internalist conception of mind that the second half makes theoretically robust (vii). This specific lack of compromise can be marked out by three tenets:
(1) mental features are solely those that are open to introspection
(2) what counts as a mental feature is determined exclusively by features internal to the subject and
(3) the way things seem to a subject determines all her mental features.
The Cartesianism of this thesis should be plain, and Farkas' delicate exegetical alignment of her views with Descartes' in the first part of the book is perhaps the most novel and interesting aspect of the work: contents that are in principle available to the faculty of introspection are precisely those the truth or veridicality of which the meditating Descartes found open to doubt. Here, however, what makes them mental is not the possibility that they could be false -- viz. the fact that they could be mere appearings -- but rather that they are, or could be, accessible to the subject in a special way, a phenomenal way. For it is only by appearing phenomenally that are they accessible - eponymously -- to the subject's point of view. Just why this Cartesianism should be considered 'internalist' is made explicit in the four chapters that make up part two.
Canonically, what counts as 'internal' is whatever it is in virtue of which I could be in situations indistinguishable from the one I am now in, despite changes in the world -- the idea here is that whatever counts as 'the same' across external change is to be designated as 'internal'. Philosophers have variously offered physicalist, functional and behavioral construals of sameness in this sense, but, in Chapter Four, Farkas argues in favour of a criterion that tallies with her diagnostic criterion. Recall Descartes' insight concerning the possibility of his radical deception by a malevolent demon - in such cases everything would appear just the same. Farkas takes this as indicative of Descartes' internalism. Just why is noteworthy: What counts as a mental feature is, on her account, fixed by the way things seem to the subject.
Now the temptation here is to read 'the way things seem' as the way things seem to the introspecting subject. But here we should read 'the way things seem' as given by the phenomenality of experience, itself a necessary condition on the possibility of introspection. So things seeming a certain way (viz. phenomenally) is a necessary condition on things seeming a certain way to a subject (viz. on introspection). But, as Descartes appreciated, things could seem a certain way to the subject, indeed the same way, without any thing being any way at all. Farkas' move is to extrapolate from this insight to the following claim: in such instances everything would appear the same because the phenomenal properties of the experience, its so-called appearance properties, would remain unchanged. Hence, from the subject's point of view, everything would not merely appear the same (yet fail to be), but in virtue of appearing the same, actually be the same. On this account then, appearing the same is being the same. And from here it is only a short move to the reassuring claim that we do afterall know what our thoughts are about: given that the realm of the mental is demarcated by whatever is introspectible, there can be no failure of self-knowledge even if the world should turn out to be more or less than it seems. The remainder of the book is taken up with spelling out just how.
In Chapter Five, attempts to render the 'appearing the same' relation epistemistically are outlined and rejected -- being indiscriminable does not entail phenomenal sameness, and only phenomenal sameness can, Farkas argues, plausibly account for the intuition that things can appear the same despite external change. This chapter is particularly valuable for the three distinct takes on the notion of indiscriminablity that Farkas meticiously sets out -- active and access indiscriminablity, and response discrimination. Chapter Six reiterates familiar arguments as to why externalism and self-knowledge are incompatible, but now drawn and critiqued in the light of Farkas' repositioning of the Internalism/Externalism boundary. While the last chapter provides a response to those, and they are many, who argue that internally individuated states are not apt for, as she puts it, laying a claim of truth upon the world (157). I detail this response as a means of gesturing at a worry.
For many theorists, 'content' specifies how the world would have to be for the content to be true. Farkas grants this much, but to this she adds a further condition, one that resonates with her proposal: as well as determining how the world must be, the phenomenal properties of the experience must be psychologically relevant to the subject's grasping the truth conditions they, in a sense, display (and they do this in virtue of what Farkas calls, acutely I think, their 'phenomenal presence' (159)). There is good reason I think to advance this kind of thought: if mental content is to figure in action explanation, the subject had better be able to grasp, and thereby make sense of, the mental states that lead her to act. But now Farkas makes a further move: a truth conditional view of content need not entail that contents have determinate truth conditions -- this was Frege's mistake. Rather, truth conditions, as specified by content, can vary from context to context even while the content remains the same. We might say, for expedience, that on such a view content operates indexically.
Now this might at once seem reminescent of Tyler Burge's proposal for content, but there is a difference. On Burge's view the indexical application of a concept at a context actually picks up content at that context, but for Farkas content is wholly internally individuated -- recall, content is fixed solely by the way things seem. But this, we might think, is puzzling: How can phenomenal properties, internally individuated, be understood to contain instructions about how claims about the world, articulated phenomenally, are to be evaluated?
In a certain sense, this may, I think, be something we could live with, specifically in the case of phenomenal color concepts. But appearances, if we allow such things into our ontology, present much more besides. And here the idiom of perspectivality becomes potent: when things appear they appear in a certain way, and not just phenomenally, but structurally -- things have an order and orientation, and these too are features of appearances that subjects must be credited with grasping if experiences are to guide action. But to take Farkas' argument to its logical conclusion we should have to insist that even structural features of experience have a phenomenology that determines how they are to be evaluated relative to a context. But what kind of phenomenology could this be? Perhaps there is a phenomenology of 'being to my left' say. But for Farkas' argument to hold this has to be determinate independently of anything ever being there. That is, she has to insist that appearing to be to the left is fixed solely by how things seem to the subject. But this seems strange. We can, for example, easily imagine instances in which things appearing to the left might have appeared to the right without a change in the way things seem (if we were presented with two symmetrical, identical objects and then rotated through 180° say). So perhaps we should conclude that her view commits us instead to the notion that being to the left or right is external to experience, and certainly if we were to follow Descartes teachings we should be sympathetic to this thought - after all, how the subject is oriented should be independent of how things seem, a thought that figures with the Cartesian insistence that brains in vats have, in some sense, 'a point of view'. But this I think threatens to make the concept of a point of view merely metaphorical.
For many theorists, having a point of view involves having a point of view on whatever it is that appears, and not merely phenomenally, but in space and time - we might say the composite of appearing is that something appears. For such theorists then, the spatiality of the concept of a perspective is non-incidental since the having of a point of view is not a property that only phenomenal properties make possible. Such theorists of course take their cue, not from Descartes, but from Kant. But perhaps there is something we can learn from this. Farkas makes a compelling case for our concept of mind being Cartesian, and it is certainly true that externalism conflicts with our concept of mental. But externalism is an explanatory thesis about the ontology of mind, and if mental facts really are perspectival facts, as Farkas insists, then, despite the lucidity and sophistication of her advocacy, compromise may after all be required to save the subject's point of view.
© 2009 Clare Mac Cumhaill
Clare Mac Cumhaill is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Her work is at the intersection of philosophy of perception, language and metaphysics.