Andrea Giananti Openness to the World: an Enquiry into the Intentionality of Perception Thèse de Doctorat présentée devant la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Fribourg, en Suisse. Approuvé par la Faculté des Lettres sur proposition des professeurs Gianfranco Soldati (premier rapporteur), Bill Brewer (deuxième rapporteur) et Heather Logue (troisième rapporteuse). Fribourg, le 25 septembre 2015. La Doyenne Prof. Bernadette Charlier Pasquier. Table of Contents Acknowledgments (p. 4) Abstract (p. 6) Introduction (p. 8) Chapter One: Intentionality (p. 13) Abstract (p. 13) Introduction (p. 13) 1. Objects (p. 15) 2. Content (p. 19) 2.1 Non-Existent Objects (p. 19) 2.2 Modes of Presentation (p. 21) 3. Satisfaction Conditions, Intentionality and Intensionality-with-an-s (p. 25) 4. Perception (p. 29) 4.1 Perception and Intentionality (p. 29) 4.2 Openness to the World (p. 32) Chapter Two: The Way Things Look: a Defence of Content (p. 39) Abstract (p. 39) Introduction (p. 39) 1. The Silence of the Senses (p. 41) 1.1 Setting the Stage (p. 41) 1.2 A Dilemma for the Representationalist (p. 43) 1.3 Phenomenal Looks (p. 49) 1.4 Content and Accessibility (p. 56) 2. The Way Things Look (p. 68) 2.1 Perceptual Content and Perceptual Constancies (p. 68) 2.2 Perceptual Content, Adverbial Modifications and Dynamic Perception (p. 71) 2 2.3 A Sense of the World: Content and Mind-Independent Objects (p. 75) 2.4 Objections and Replies (p. 79) Chapter Three: Perception and Illusion (p. 84) Abstract (p. 84) Introduction (p. 84) 1. Sense-Data (p. 86) 2. Representationalism (p. 90) 3. Pure Relationalism, Naïve Realism and Disjunctivism (p. 104) 4. Pure Relationalism and Perceptual Error (p. 113) 4.1 Mixed Accounts (p. 118) 4.2 Appearance Properties (p. 120) 4.3.1 Visual Similarities (p. 122) 4.3.2 Phenomenological Intelligibility and Sensible Qualities (p. 127) Chapter Four: Perception, Phenomenal Character and Particularity (p. 138) Abstract (p. 138) Introduction (p. 138) 1. A Representationalist Argument (p. 143) 2. Particularity and Generality (p. 148) 3. Perception and Generality (p. 153) 3.1 Perception, Determinacy and Similarities (p. 155) 3.2 A Two-Headed Monster and the Generality of Perception (p. 158) Conclusion: Reconciling Naïve Realism and Content? (p. 164) References (p. 172) 3 Acknowledgements Many people have contributed in several ways to making this thesis better than it would have been otherwise. I could not have started this work without my main supervisor, Gianfranco Soldati. Gianfranco encouraged me, back in 2009, to write the research proposal that later became the starting point for this thesis, and he has been stimulating and supportive ever since. My numerous and long philosophical discussions with him taught me always to see the contemporary literature within a larger philosophical context, and the present work is informed through and through by ideas that emerged during those discussions. Bill Brewer supervised me during my time as a visiting doctoral student at King’s College London. My chats with him helped me greatly to better understand fundamental questions in the philosophy of perception, and his books have been a constant source of inspiration and a model of clarity. Despite our substantial disagreement over important issues, he has always helped me to make my arguments as forceful as possible, even when those consisted in direct criticisms of his own view. Will McNeill read large portions of a late draft of the thesis. He greatly helped me to improve the structure of the work at important junctures, and he saved me from a number of mistakes. Michael Sollberger has read almost everything that I have written during my doctoral studies. He has always been patient, generous and very open to my philosophical ideas, even when these were formulated in a very confusing way in some of the early drafts. Jorgen Dyrstad read a late draft of my work with astonishing rapidity, and returned it with an incredible amount of comments. His comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the literature have been extremely valuable to me, and his enthusiasm for philosophy is highly contagious. 4 I would also like to thank Davor Bodrozic, Filipe Carijo, Tim Crane, Coralie Dorsaz, Fabian Dorsch, Giulia Felappi, Ivan Ivanov, Dave Jenkins, Fiona Macpherson, Martine Nida- Rümelin and Mattia Sorgon. Writing this thesis was made possible by the Swiss National Science Foundation (research grants Nos. 100018_129598 and P1FRP1_148549). 5 Abstract When we perceive we are under the impression of being directly aware of concrete, mind- independent objects. We also consider perception as a basic, reliable source for acquiring beliefs and an effective means for coping with the environment. In the philosophical literature, this direct and basic character of perception is sometimes captured by saying that perception is openness to the world. Articulating, refining and vindicating as far as possible this commonsensical view of perception as openness to the world is the main objective of this work. In order to make the metaphor of openness tractable in theoretical terms, I set up the dialectic in terms of a contrast between representationalism, which holds that perception represents things as being a certain way, and pure relationalism, which holds that perception can be openness to the world only by being a non-representational relation between a subject and objects in the world. The main thesis that I defend with several arguments in this work is that perception is both representational and relational. Indeed, it intelligibly relates us to the world in virtue of its representational content. In chapter one, I place perception in the broader context of intentional states. I articulate a view on which intentional states are directed toward their objects in virtue of having representational content, and show that prima facie the arguments for thinking that paradigmatic intentional states such as belief have content apply to perception too. I also explain why pure relationalists would reject the application of the content-model to perception. Chapter two is devoted to Charles Travis’s argument that perceptual experience does not have content. I counter his argument by offering a phenomenological account of perceptual constancy, and I show that content is necessary for capturing constancy in theoretical terms. Further, I argue that content helps us to better explain how the mind-independent nature of concrete objects is manifest in the phenomenology of perceptual experience. Chapter three concerns the question of how we should elucidate perceptual experience as openness to the world in the face of illusion and hallucination. I consider three possible approaches (sense-data theories, representationalism, and pure relationalism), and I argue that a view on which perceptual experience is both representational and relational can best make sense of the relevant phenomena. 6 In the fourth chapter, I consider the debate on phenomenal character between representationalist and purely relationalist views in light of a distinction between particularity and generality. I show how representationalists are committed to there being an element of generality in perception, and how pure relationalists construe perception as wholly particular instead. I defend the representationalist view on the grounds that generality is necessary to make sense of the phenomenal and epistemic determinacy of perception. In the concluding remarks, I consider the question of whether my view can make room for the relationality of perception, and I argue again that only a distorted view of the metaphor of openness to the world could lead one to think that content and relationality are incompatible. 7 Introduction This is a work on the intentionality of perception. The topic of intentionality is how mental states can be about the world, and thus the topic of this thesis is how our perceptual experiences can be about the world and the things it contains. The question lends itself to different interpretations, so I should take this opportunity to clarify that I intend to discuss the intentionality of perception in a particular way. There is one influential approach to the question that I want to mention just to set it aside. Over the last few decades, a number of research programs have interpreted the problem of intentionality as that of reducing intentional notions such as reference, content and truth to non-intentional notions more in tune with natural sciences, such as causality, information and (a specific understanding of) representation. The aim of these research programs, pioneered by Fred Dretske (1981), Jerry Fodor (1987) and Ruth Millikan (1984), has been to naturalize intentionality, that is, to conceive of intentionality in such a way as to render it compatible with a scientific view of the world and human beings. Although these programs have been exciting and fruitful, the naturalization of the intentionality of perception is not my primary concern here. Rather, I aim to elucidate perception as openness to the world. Openness to the world is a metaphor that has been popularized in the analytic world by John McDowell (1994), which is meant to capture the direct and basic character of our perceptual encounter with the world: when we perceive, there is nothing standing between the world and us, and perceiving the world is the most basic source for our conception of concrete reality. It has to be acknowledged that both directness and basicness could be captured within a naturalistic framework. For example, one could capture the fact that perception is direct by emphasizing that perception has the function of conveying information about concrete objects, rather than, say, light arrays. One could also capture the basicness of perception by saying that the intentionality of perception is, unlike that of artifacts and language, original, or underived – that is, its intentionality does not depend on the agent’s possession of intentional capacities.1 Why do I prefer a metaphor to scientific language? The difference between a naturalistic approach and what I do in this thesis could be characterized as the difference between an explanatory task and a descriptive task.