Phenomenal intentionality and the evidential roleof perceptual experience: comments on Jack Lyons,Perception and Basic Beliefs

Terry Horgan

Published online: 2 September 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Perception and Basic Beliefs is a fine book. The overall dialectic is always kept

clearly in view for the reader. The arguments are vigorously presented, are always

provocative, and are often quite persuasive. The book is very well informed, both

about the contours of recent epistemology and about pertinent work in cognitive

science. The writing is elegant, crisp, and uncluttered. Lyons’ way of parsing the

landscape of epistemological positions concerning justified belief is very illumi-

nating, especially because of his emphasis on the distinction between evidential and

non-evidential forms of justification. The book was a pleasure to read, and I

recommend it very strongly to any philosopher or philosophy graduate student

interested in epistemology.

That said, I also find myself in fairly strong disagreement with the position Lyons

stakes out. My main goal here will be to explain why I am not persuaded by his

overall argument, which will involve saying some things along the way about key

aspects of an alternative approach to epistemic justification that I find more

plausible than his. I will also say something about ‘‘zombie epistemology.’’

At the end of Chapter 2, he gives a nice, pithy summary of the large-scale

dialectical structure of his overall argument in the book, with reference to the

following two principles:

Belief Principle: Only beliefs can evidentially justify beliefs.

Grounds Principle: All justified beliefs have grounds, that is, evidential justifiers.

I quote his summary, from p. 36:

[T]he distinction between the evidential and nonevidential justifiers yields a

version of the Sellarsian dilemma (or something like it) that is at once stronger

and weaker than the standard version. It is stronger in that it really does

T. Horgan (&)

University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

e-mail: thorgan@email.arizona.edu

123

Philos Stud (2011) 153:447–455

DOI 10.1007/s11098-010-9604-2

provide a good argument against experientialism but weaker in that it leaves

nonevidentialism completely untouched. The basic idea is this: the dilemma

shows that experiential states cannot serve as evidential justifiers for beliefs,

thus establishing the truth of the Belief Principle and consequently the

falsehood of experientialism (which by definition denies the Belief Principle).

Coherentism or doxasticism more generally follows if the Grounds Principle is

also assumed. Since doxasticism is false, and since the Belief Principle is true,

the Grounds Principle must also be false. Therefore, a nonevidentialist

nondoxasticism must be true. (My emphasis)

The version of nonevidentialist nondoxasticism that he goes on to articulate and

defend is a foundationalist form of reliabilism, one which asserts (i) that basic

beliefs, when justified, are justified nonevidentially, and (2) that nonbasic beliefs,

when justified, are justified evidentially.

As regards his master argument, my own position is that there is a form of

evidentialist nondoxasticism that is independently very plausible, and that this kind

of evidentialism can successfully fend off his attempt to wield a version of the

Sellarsian dilemma against all forms of evidentialism. The view I have in mind is

probably best described, in terms of his own typology, as a form of what he would

call percept evidentialism (PE), as opposed to what he would call sensationevidentialism (SE). I should add, however, that he wields the distinction between

sensations and percepts in ways that seem to embody some presuppositions about

matters in philosophy of mind that I myself would wish to strongly repudiate—a

matter that I will take up shortly. Here is some of what he says about the distinction:

The standard account of the sensation-perception distinction suggests that

sensations, even though they are sensations of something, do not have full-

blown intentionality in the way that percepts do. Perception involves the

categorizing of distal stimuli and thus subsumption under one or more

concepts. Sensations, though rich in qualia, either lack content altogether or at

least lack conceptual and propositional content (though, of course, we must

invoke concepts in describing them and propositional contents in forming

beliefs about them)…. I will thus stipulate that sensations, for the present

purposes, are those low-level mental states that have qualia associated with

them (and thus perhaps a kind of qualitative content) but lack conceptual and

propositional content, while percepts are those higher-level states that involve

the subsumption of distal stimuli under concepts and hence have a

conceptual—and I will assume propositional—content. (pp. 46–47)

He goes on to press versions of his neo-Sellarsian argument first against SE, and

then against PE.

Since the version of experientialism that I myself find most plausible would fit

better within his own typology as a form of PE rather than a form SE, I want to

concentrate on the neo-Sellarsian argumentation that he directs specifically at PE.

I find two principal arguments in the section called ‘‘Percepts as Grounds’’

(Section 3 of Chapter 3), which I will take up in turn. The first argument is given in

the following passage:

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[W]ithout sensations, having a percept would be introspectively little different

from having a hunch, a strong inclination to believe. What motivates

experientialism is a commitment to some kind of internalism; there must be

something available from the agent’s perspective, which counts for that agent

as evidence for thinking that this hunch is something more, something that

may, perhaps must, be taken seriously. The problem is that the higher up on

the hierarchy one begins the justificatory process, the less there is to

distinguish mere hunches from genuine perception. But the lower one goes,

the wider the sensation-perception gap becomes and the less plausible it is to

think the nondoxastic state in question can bear any belief-independent

evidential relation to beliefs.

At the low end of the hierarchy, the states are introspectively vivid and

qualitatively rich, thus apt for serving the subjective role experientialism

requires. But the evidential import of those states is far from clear…. As we

ascend the hierarchy, the colors drain away from the states. Informationally rich

but qualitatively impoverished, the higher level states close the percept-belief

gap but leave nothing subjective for the agent to go on….. The ecumenical

approach would be argue that a whole range of states be brought to bear; even if

any individual representation is incapable of playing the role experientialism

requires, perhaps the congeries of states that is experience can serve as belief-

independent evidence. However, it is hard to see how the experience can serve

as evidence if none of its component states can. (pp. 69–70)

I find this argument challenging but unpersuasive. The fundamental problem is

that it appears to rest on a presupposition about the relation between phenomenal

consciousness and mental intentionality that I think is profoundly mistaken

(although it has been widely held in philosophy of mind over the past 50 years or

so). This presupposition is what John Tienson and I have dubbed separatism. The

separatist holds that there are two kinds of mental state that are pretty much disjoint

from one another (although they can occur simultaneously as components of a

compound total mental state). On one hand are phenomenal mental states

(‘‘qualia’’), which have qualitative character (‘‘what-it-is-like-ness’’) but allegedly

either lack mental intentionality altogether or at any rate lack full-fledged

propositional content. (Sensory episodes like pains, tickles, smells, and color

experiences are typically regarded by separatists as falling under this rubric.) On the

other hand are richly intentional mental states, which have propositional content but

allegedly lack qualitative character. (Beliefs, wishes, wonderings-whether, hunches,

and the like are typically regarded by separatists as falling under this rubric.)

As I say, the argument lately quoted appears to rest quite heavily on the

presupposition of separatism. The picture suggested goes as follows. States near the

low end of the sensation-perception hierarchy are richly suffused with qualia, but

are either lacking in intentionality altogether or at any rate have only nonpropo-

sitional, nonconceptual contents involving intensity differences, discontinuities in

the visual field, and the like; these states either bear no pertinent evidential relations

at all to the propositional contents of perceptual beliefs, or at any rate do not have

the right kind of content to provide good evidence for perceptual beliefs. States

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toward the high end of the hierarchy, on the other hand, have propositional contents

closely related to (or perhaps identical with) the contents of perceptual beliefs, but

are either lacking in phenomenal character altogether or at any rate have so little of

it that, either way, these states are no more able to constitute subjective,

introspectively accessible, evidence for perceptual beliefs than are mere hunches

that are experienced as popping into mind ‘‘out of nowhere.’’ Indeed, a percept is

essentially just a hunch accompanied by ‘‘phenomenal paint,’’ and the qualitative

character of the phenomenal paint does nothing to mitigate the fact that a hunch that

p does not constitute evidence for a belief that p. The thoroughly separatism-infused

nature of this picture is reinforced by the following remarks in the text, which occur

immediately after the passage lately quoted:

Experiences have two kinds of properties: semantic properties and qualitative

properties. Both kinds of properties are important, for experiences are

supposed to function as ground-level evidence, presumably in virtue of their

semantic properties, while at the same time offering something to appease

internalist scruples, presumably in virtue of their qualitative properties. The

sensory component of experience is subject to the argument presented against

SE [earlier in the book, and principally to the effect that if sensations have

content at all, it is not the kind that can provide good evidential grounds for

perceptual beliefs], leaving only the higher level states and their semantic

properties. But a percept with only semantic properties won’t do the work that

PE wants it to do. (p. 70)

Now, if one embraces separatism in some form, then this neo-Sellarsian argument

against evidentialism about perceptual beliefs is apt to look very compelling. On the

other hand, I myself maintain that separatism is profoundly mistaken. I have so

argued in a number of writings, some collaborative with one or several of my

philosophical brothers-in-arms John Tienson, George Graham, and Uriah Kriegel.

(See Horgan and Tienson (2002); Horgan et al. (2004), 2006); Horgan and Kriegel

(in press). Others who have so argued include Galen Strawson (1994); Charles

Siewert (1998), and David Pitt (2004)) For instance, in Horgan and Tienson (2002), it

is argued that on one hand that paradigmatic phenomenal mental states like pains,

tickles, and color sensations are richly intentional, and on the other hand that

paradigmatic intentional mental states like occurrent beliefs, occurent wishes,

occurrent intentions, and the like are richly phenomenal (although their proprietary

phenomenal character is not sensory phenomenology.) Color experiences, for

example, represent colors as properties instantiated by the surfaces of external

objects; this is an example of the rich, propositional-content-involving, intentionality

of sensory experience. And virtually all of one’s mental life that is conscious-as-

opposed-to-unconscious is suffused with proprietary phenomenal character, much of

it non-sensory (for instance, the what-it-is-like of hearing spoken sentences of

Russian and understanding them, versus the phenomenologically much less rich

what-it-is-like of hearing spoken sentences of Russian without understanding them).

On this radically non-separatist view about phenomenology and intentionality, the

most fundamental kind of intentionality is phenomenally constituted (Tienson and

I call it phenomenal intentionality), is narrow, and is shared in common with all one’s

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actual and possible phenomenal duplicates (including one’s brain-in-vat phenomenal

duplicate). Also—and this is especially germane in relation to Lyons’ neo-Sellarsian

argument against percept-evidentialism regarding perceptual beliefs—sensory-

perceptual experience is both phenomenologically rich and intentionally rich. Its

overall phenomenal character is inherently intentional. Furthermore, phenomeno-

logical aspects of its overall phenomenal character inherently possess propositionalintentional content involving familiar perceptual categories (table, chair, tree,

person, Jack Lyons, brown, rectangular, etc., etc.).

On this non-separatist approach to phenomenology and intentionality, a percept

is not anything like a ‘‘hunch with non-intentional phenomenal paint.’’ Rather, it is a

richly qualitative state whose phenomenal character is inherently intentional, and

whose overall phenomenal intentionality includes aspects of propositional content

(as well as additional aspects of fine-grained detail that arguably should be classified

as ‘‘nonconceptual content’’). An apparent ambient environment is presented to the

experiencing agent in sensory-perceptual experience, and it is presented as

containing various familiar objects, positioned at various locations relative to

oneself and instantiating various familiar properties and relations. The overall

presentational content of sensory-perceptual experience includes numerous items of

propositional content; and such experience, by virtue of its presentational nature,

constitutes strong prima facie evidence for perceptual beliefs whose propositional

content is part of the overall phenomenal content of the sensory-perceptual

experience itself.

This is not to deny that the overall phenomenal character of sensory-perceptual

experience includes certain low-level ‘‘core’’ aspects that are abstractable from the

rest and that lack the kinds of propositional content that are part of normal sensory-

perceptual phenomenology. And it is not to deny that it might be possible, perhaps

because of brain damage, to undergo abnormal sensory-perceptual phenomenology

that lacks some of this propositional content while still possessing the core

aspects—as in Oliver Sacks’ case of the man who mistook his wife for a hat. Rather,

the point is that ordinary sensory-perceptual phenomenology is qualitatively much

richer than that. It includes not just such low-level aspects but numerous aspects of

propositional content as well, all inextricably bound up with one another in the

overall, presentational, phenomenal character of one’s sensory-perceptual experi-

ence. (Most of us have enormous difficulty trying to even imagine what it would be

like, when looking at one’s wife in good light, to mistake her for a hat.) It is not just

a hunch that there is a table in front of me; rather, my overall experience is as-of

being presented with an ambient environment that includes a table.

Those of us in philosophy of mind who reject separatism, and who espouse this

radically non-separatist approach to mentality in general and to sensory-perceptual

experience in particular, have put forth various arguments in favor of our view.

I have mentioned one already: the phenomenological difference between hearing

spoken speech when one understands the speaker’s language and hearing the same

sounds without understanding them. Another is the fact that pre-theoretic common

sense construes the brain in the vat as having a mental life that strongly matches the

mental life of an ordinary human; arguably, this intuitive reaction is grounded in an

appreciation of the fact that the envatted brain has the same phenomenology,

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including the same rich phenomenal intentionality, as does an ordinary human.

I now submit that Lyons has unwittingly provided non-separatists with the key

premise for yet another argument, which goes as follows.

1. If separatism is true, then sensory-perceptual experience cannot constitute

evidence for perceptual beliefs.

2. Sensory-perceptual experience does constitute evidence for perceptual beliefs.

Therefore,

3. Separatism is not true.

In effect, Lyons ably defends premise 1 (although his stated argument is non-

conditional and assumes the antecedent of premise 1). Yet premise 2 is overwhelm-

ingly plausible—all the more so when one attends introspectively to one’s own

sensory-perceptual experience with the question in mind whether this experience

constitutes evidence for one’s perceptual beliefs. So much the worse for separatism.

I turn now to Lyons’ second argument against percept evidentialism, which

occurs in the following passages:

Suppose that among the outputs of the visual system is the representation R: a

sentence in Mentalese with the content that the upper line (say, of the Muller-

Lyer illusion) is longer. The rest of the organism is wired so as to—

defeasibly—rely on such outputs of the visual system in inference and

practical deliberation and so forth, in short, to treat it in such a way that it has

the functional role appropriate to beliefs. In normal conditions such as these

R just is the belief that the upper line is longer…. In very crude terms, the idea

is that ‘‘accepted’’ percepts may actually be beliefs even though ‘‘rejected’’

percepts are not…. The kinds belief and percept are distinct: being a belief is a

different thing from being a percept. What matters, however, is whether the

token percept is distinct from the token perceptual belief it is alleged to justify.

If not, then the picture proposed by PE is a nonstarter. PE, like experientialism

more generally, holds that perceptual beliefs are based on things other then

themselves, in particular, nondoxastic percepts. If these percepts are doxastic

after all—worse, if they are in fact the very beliefs whose justification is at

issue—then this view collapses. (pp. 71–72)

He goes on in chapter 4 to argue, with an eye on work in cognitive science on

human perception, that it is quite likely that in fact the human perceptual system

works in such a way that the token percepts it generates are normally also token

beliefs.

I myself have long thought it plausible that token perceptual experiences have the

default status of token beliefs. This idea accords well with how things seem

introspectively, and it constitutes a less cumbersome form of psychological

economy than one in which token percepts are distinct from token perceptual

beliefs. However, I think that percept experientialism, far from collapsing in the

face of the contention that token percepts normally are identical to token perceptual

beliefs, can accommodate this contention quite easily and quite naturally. The key

idea can be put in several ways. For instance: a token state’s being a belief that p is

452 T. Horgan

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evidentially justified by its being a percept whose overall content includes the

proposition p. Alternatively: an epistemic agent’s instantiating the state-type

believing that p is evidentially justified by the agent’s instantiating a percept-type

whose overall content includes the proposition p. Alternatively: the token state, qua

belief that p, is evidentially justified by this self-same token state, qua percept

whose overall content includes the proposition p. I see no obvious problem with the

approach that is embodied in these kinds of locutions, and so I am unpersuaded by

Lyons’ second argument against percept evidentialism.

Let me turn now to Lyons’ treatment of zombie epistemology. He explains as

follows how he is using the term ‘zombie’:

There are two senses of the term ‘zombie’ in play in philosophy. In some

circles, a zombie is an exact physical duplicate of some actual normal person,

where, unlike its normal counterpart, the zombie lacks conscious experiences

altogether…. There is a less common but weaker and less controversial sense

of ‘zombie’, according to which a zombie is merely as psychologically similar

to one of us as possible, consistent with its lacking conscious experiences…. A

zombie in this sense (and this is the sense in which I shall be using the term

‘zombie’) is certainly possible, and they [sic] would still be capable of having

beliefs, desires, hopes, and the like, and much of its psychology would be like

ours. (pp. 50–51)

One of his key claims in the book is that zombies of this kind could perfectly well

have justified beliefs (according to his account) even though, by stipulation, they

lack conscious experience. (In context, it is fairly clear that what they lack is

phenomenal consciousness.) So much the worse, he argues, for experiential

evidentialism about justified belief.

I myself would deny that zombies of this kind would have genuine beliefs at all,

or any other ordinary propositional attitudes. Accordingly, I would also deny that

the normative notion of epistemic justification is even applicable to them or to their

internal states. Arguing that zombies have no beliefs would be a project I cannot

undertake here, but let me make just a few quick remarks to give you a sense for one

line of argument I would deploy. It seems fairly easy to conceive someone who is a

‘‘partial zombie,’’ in the following respect. Although he consistently behaves like an

ordinary person who understands Chinese, he experiences all spoken and written

Chinese as meaningless noises and squiggles—even when he produces these noises

and squiggles himself. He lives in China, and throughout his life he constantly finds

himself undergoing spontaneous impulses to generate various of these squiggles and

sounds in various situations, and to engage in various specific actions upon hearing

or seeing such sounds or squiggles that have been produced by others. He routinely

acts on these spontaneous impulses, with little or no hesitation. And the people with

whom he interacts usually seem friendly and pleasant enough, in response to his

behavior in interpersonal or group settings, even though he never experiences either

others or himself as engaged in linguistic communication. This fact is something he

normally experiences as a massive coincidence, since he never construes the sounds

and squiggles as language. Even though he behaves in ways that make him appear to

other people as someone who understands written and spoken Chinese and engages

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in ordinary linguistic communication, he has no experience as-of deploying public

language or as-of acting for purposes that arise from experiences of language-

understanding.

Now, I submit that two claims about this thought-experimental chap are both

very plausible. First, he is lacking an aspect of ordinary human phenomenology,

viz., language-underderstanding experience. And second, because he lacks such

experience, he also has no beliefs about the meanings of any of those sounds or

squiggles. And I think that this line of thought can be generalized (although doing so

is something I can’t pursue here): get rid of phenomenology altogether (as in the

case of Lyons’ thought-experimental zombies), and you thereby get rid of genuine

beliefs altogether. (For further pertinent discussion, see Horgan (in press).)

Suppose I’m right; zombies have no beliefs, and thus their internal states are not

appropriately appraisable as being epistemically justified or epistemically unjusti-

fied. What should we say about their internal states? Well, a natural-looking picture

is the following. These zombies have no real mentality at all, because they lack

phenomenology and thereby lack the most fundamental kind of mental intention-

ality (viz., phenomenal intentionality). Nonetheless, their internal states do have a

non-mental kind of content even so, which might be called functional indication.

The states indicate various external states of affairs by virtue of systematically

co-varying with them, and the states play important functional roles within the

internal behavior-control architecture of these zombies. (Hence the term ‘functional

indication’.) Since these functional-indication states are not beliefs, they are not

evaluable as being epistemically justified or epistemically unjustified; in that

respect, they are like the temperature-indicating states of a thermostat. However

(again like the thermostat states), the zombie’s functional-indication states are still

assessable as being functionally apt or functionally non-apt—where this kind of

normative assessment is largely a matter of whether they reliably indicate external

states of the world. And it is just here, I suggest, that Lyons’ story about zombies

becomes applicable. It is a plausible-looking account of what makes for functional

aptness of functional-indication states in zombies—even though Lyons is wrong to

think that zombies have beliefs at all, and hence he is also wrong to think that they

have epistemically justified beliefs. A better title for his book would have been

Feature Detection and Basic Indication-States.

References

Horgan, T. (in press). From agentive phenomenology to cognitive phenomenology: A guide for the

perplexed. In T. Bayne & M. Montague (Eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Horgan, T., & Kriegel, U. (in press). The phenomenal intentionality research program. In T. Horgan &

U. Kriegel (Eds.), The Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Horgan, T., & Tienson, J. (2002). The intentionality of phenomenology and the phenomenology of

intentionality. In D. Chalmers (Ed.), Philosophy of mind: Classical and contemporary readings(pp. 520–533). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Horgan, T., Tienson, J., & Graham, G. (2004). Phenomenal intentionality and the brain in a vat. In

R. Schantz (Ed.), The externalist challenge (pp. 297–317). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

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Horgan, T., Tienson, J., & Graham, G. (2006). Internal-world skepticism and the self-presentational

nature of phenomenal consciousness. In U. Kriegel & K. Williford (Eds.), Self-representationalapproaches to consciousness (pp. 41–61). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pitt, D. (2004). The phenomenology of cognition: Or what is it like to think that P? Philosophy andPhenomenological Research, 69, 1–36.

Siewert, C. (1998). The significance of consciousness. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Strawson, G. (1994). Mental reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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