PHIL 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Empiricism, Expansionism, Qualia
4 May 2018
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Philosophy of Mind
11.07 Lecture Notes – Cognitive Phenomenology
Cogitive Pheoeology: What’s the Issue?
- Sensory consciousness – sensory phenomenology (ex: experience of seeing red, smelling
a rose)
- Is that all there is to consciousness?
- Interested in non-sensory conscious experience associated with thoughts
- Cognitive phenomenology: distinctive (non-sensory) conscious experiences associated
with cognitive activities such as thinking, reasoning, and understanding
o Sensory imagery does not only apply to stuff you currently perceive
o You can reflect on memory and that would still be sensory imagery (form of a
kind of mental image)
o Sensory imagery will more broadly refer to any type of sensory experience
- Does it exist?
o Siewert: yes
o Prinz: no
- Historical Antecedents
o Some of the British empiricists (e.g., Berkeley and Hume) seemed to think that
consciousness was exclusively sensory in nature
o For Berkeley and Hume, all of our conscious mental states took the form of
mental images (images as in visual, auditory, or tactile imagery)
o Descartes seems to think that we are conscious of more than just sensory
imagery
▪ Sensory imagery is only variety of conscious experience
▪ There are also conscious experiences associated with the activity of the
intellect and the exercise of the will
- Restrictivism v. Expansionism
o Restrictivism: for any representation with qualitative character, there could be a
qualitatively identical representation that has only sensory content
▪ Thought = sentences we rehearse in our and perhaps the images that
come along with them
o Expansionism: some representations with qualitative character are
distinguishable from every representation that has only sensory content
▪ We have cognitive experiences that are irreducible to these sensory
imageries
- Side note: emotional phenomenology
o How do emotions fit into this picture?
o Mae suggests that Piz’s ie is ot oplete
o Response: Prinz actually thinks that our awareness of our emotions is a kind of
perception, specifically, a perception of the inner working of our body
o Thus, on his view, emotional phenomenology is just a special class of sensory
phenomenology
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Document Summary
Sensory consciousness sensory phenomenology (ex: experience of seeing red, smelling a rose) Interested in non-sensory conscious experience associated with thoughts. Does it exist: siewert: yes, prinz: no. Suppose that a monolingual english speaker and a french speaker are listening to. If this is correct, it looks like there is a difference in their phenomenology that goes beyond sensory phenomenology. If restrictivism is true, then any difference in experience is a difference in sensory imagery: 2. But in the radio example, experience differs without any corresponding difference in sensory imagery: 3. Therefore, restrictivism is false: prinz would push back in terms of premise #2. In terms of the ambiguous sentences: we might have different experiences but this may be due to the subtle shifts in visual imagery. Prinz on imageless and languageless thoughts: perhaps my sudden realization that i left something somewhere actually is experience in the form of visual imagery and inner speech.
