Comments on Sytsma’s “Folk Psychology and Phenomenal Consciousness”

Adam J. Arico

Department of Philosophy

University of Arizona

 

Thanks, Justin, for the paper.  The data are really interesting and, I’m sure, will have broader implications beyond the present question of Dennett’s theoretical commitments.  Let me quickly preface my comments by acknowledging that I am no Dennett scholar and do not offer my criticisms from the position of preserving heterophenomenology.  I leave such an undertaking to some brave participant in the “audience”.  Hopefully the comments will nonetheless prove useful for Justin and perhaps even provoke some discussion in the “q&a”. My comments come in two parts: the first part will focus on the overall structure of Justin’s argument against Dennett; the second part addresses the experimental data and, specifically, the interpretations of those data that Justin endorses. 

In the opening paragraphs of Justin’s paper, an argument is sketched that would challenge Daniel Dennett’s heterophenomenology in a new and interesting way.  The apparent argument centers, unlike most criticisms, on the idea that Dennett goes too far in attributing to people beliefs about phenomenal states.  As the opening paragraph puts it, one of the prominent assumptions that Dennett’s HP takes for granted is “that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness is found in folk psychology (perhaps implicitly).” (1)  As Justin points out, this assumption is coming under fire, with various studies finding no empirical evidence that the folk have even a tacit concept of phenomenal consciousness.  It seems, from the introductory and first sections, that Justin’s argument would challenge Dennett’s HP by showing that folk language does not actually express beliefs about phenomenal states, so we needn’t include phenomenal states in the list of explananda for the heterophenomenological study of consciousness.  As Justin points out, this would indeed be a novel response to Dennett’s method, and, I think, would make for an interesting argument.

This, however, is not the argument that Justin ultimately offers in the paper.  Rather, after a brief discussion of Dennett’s theoretical commitments, it seems that an altogether different argument is on offer.  This argument instead centers on Dennett’s presupposition that the folk think modern science shares in Locke’s view of secondary qualities; that is, the argument that Justin ends up offering focuses on and challenges Dennett’s claim that the folk interpret science as taking a Lockean stance on colors, aromas, tastes, and sounds:

The suggestion is that the folk treat colors, for example, as belonging to the mind and not to mind-independent external objects; as such, two minds seeing one “colored” object might see two radically different colors.  But: Is this really how most non-philosophers understand consciousness and the qualities that we are aware of in perception? (5)

 

Justin then goes on to present empirical support against the claim that the folk think colors and pains belong to the mind.  I’ll look more closely at the experiments shortly, but first I want to quickly discuss the line of reasoning by which Justin gets from the premise that folk do not locate colors and pains in the mind to the conclusion that Dennett’s understanding of the folk theory of consciousness is mistaken.  The argument, as I see it, seems to run something like this:

1.      Dennett’s HP method claims that the folk express beliefs about having, among other things, phenomenal experiences of percepts (e.g., feeling pain, seeing red).

2.      This claim reflects the assumption in premise 3

3.      Dennett assumes that the folk see colors, aromas, tastes, and sounds as belonging “to the mind and not to mind-independent external objects.”

4.      The data suggests that the folk do not, in fact, think that colors and pains belong to the mind; rather, the data seems to show that the folk take colors and pains to reside mind-independently.

5.      Therefore, Dennett’s claim that the folk express beliefs about phenomenal experiences goes too far.

I don’t think that I have misrepresented the argument as it appears in Justin’s paper; yet, on this formulation, it’s pretty clear that the conclusion does not exactly follow from the premises.  Obviously, just because Dennett may be mistaken in attributing to the folk a Lockean interpretation of science, that does not mean that Dennett is also mistaken in claiming that the folk express beliefs about having phenomenal experiences.  As far as I can tell (though, again, I am no Dennett scholar), his claim about folk reports of mental states does not depend, in any logical or theoretical way, upon his assumption about the lay interpretation of science as holding secondary qualities.  The assumptions are, on their face, entirely independent.  Maybe there is a connection to be made between them; maybe, when one gets down to the nuts and bolts of Dennett’s HP method, it in some way hinges on the accuracy of his claim about the folk interpretation of science.  If so, I don’t see it.  Hopefully, if such a connection exists, Justin can shed some light and make that connection more salient. 

Before discussing the new experiments that Justin presents, though, I want to briefly discuss the earlier experiment by Sytsma & Machery, which Justin offers up (§3) as tentative evidence against Dennett.  Let me first say that, in large part, I have been sympathetic to Justin’s positions regarding the folk psychology of phenomenal consciousness.  I agree with, and have echoed in my own work, his previous arguments that the work by Knobe & Prinz does not demonstrate what it claims to.  And we are in complete agreement that no work to date has shown positively that the folk possess (even tacitly) a notion of phenomenal consciousness commensurate with that of the philosopher.  Now, having said that, I want to take some issue with the rather bold claim that Sytsma & Machery offer as an interpretation of a previous experiment, an interpretation that Justin presents at the end of section 3 as a sort of springboard for his new studies. 

In this earlier experiment, various scenarios were presented to both philosophers and “folk” in which an agent (either a robot or a human) was asked to manipulate a red box (in half of the scenarios, the agent was also shocked).  Sytsma & Machery found that, while philosophers consistently denied both feeling pain and seeing red to the robot, the folk attributed one (red) but not the other (pain).  As Justin says, they concluded from this data that “the folk do not share the philosophers’ concept of phenomenal consciousness.” (7)

As I said before, I have previously agreed with Justin’s claims that the evidence fails to demonstrate that the folk and philosophers share a concept of phenomenal consciousness; but this is a different and much weaker claim than Sytsma & Machery’s conclusion that the folk, in fact, do not have the philosopher’s concept.  The former claim does not come down one way or the other as to what concepts the folk possess, but points out that the supposed evidence for thinking the folk do possess the philosopher’s concept does not, in fact, support such a conclusion.  The latter claim, on the other hand, forfeits agnosticism and makes the substantive claim that the folk do not possess the philosopher’s concept of phenomenal consciousness.  Sytsma & Machery, then, reach farther than most theorists working on the folk psychology of consciousness have so far been willing to go, so I want to press a bit on this interpretation of their data.  Namely, I want to add pressure by offering an alternative explanation of the data that remains agnostic on whether or not the folk have the concept of phenomenal consciousness. 

While Sytsma & Machery argue that the different attribution-patterns between philosophers and folk betrays a different conceptual framework (i.e., the philosopher’s includes ‘phenomenal consciousness’ while the folk’s does not), it is equally consistent with the data that the folk might have the same conceptual framework as the philosopher with respect to consciousness, but a different conceptual framework (or understanding or opinion) regarding robots.  That is, it could be the case that the folk have a (perhaps tacit) concept of phenomenal consciousness, but they disagree with philosophers as to whether or not robots are sufficiently equipped to have certain phenomenally experiences.  It might be that, for the modality of color perception, the folk opinion of robots is rather high, while amongst philosophers robots are not perceived to be sufficiently technologically equipped.  That the response pattern for the modality of tactile (pain) perception is similar between folk and philosophers merely shows that the two sets of opinions converge with respect to the sensory abilities of robots.  While I can offer no empirical results of my own to support this interpretation, and while I don’t actually endorse the idea that the folk possess the philosopher’s concept, it nonetheless seems a viable alternative to the more ambitious interpretation offered by Sytsma & Machery.  And so long as there remains a viable alternative explanation that makes room for folk and philosopher sharing the concept, it seems agnosticism remains the most prudent position.  I would be interested to hear what Justin makes of this possible alternate explanation and whether he thinks there is further reason for discarding our agnosticism on this issue in favor of (for lack of a better term) skepticism.

Let me finish by very quickly saying something about Justin’s new experimental data.  Though I would be interested to see what sort of information was included in the introductory paragraph given to subjects in experiment 1, educating them on the philosophical dispute concerning the nature of colors, I don’t have anything substantive to say about this experiment.  In fact, there is only one point of dispute of any significance that I see as potentially problematic for any of Justin’s interpretations of the experimental results. 

In the second experiment, Justin presented subjects with a brief description of various instances in which someone who has been seriously injured and is in ongoing pain might report being distracted from the pain.  Subjects were then asked whether the injured person was still in pain but just not feeling it at the moment, or whether there was no pain in the injured person during that period.  Subjects tended to respond with the former, saying that the pain was still there, but that the injured person was not feeling it.  As Justin points out, this runs contrary to the received philosophical view.  He then goes on to say that this shows that the folk locate pains in the body (i.e., ‘outside the mind’).  While I personally find this interpretation acceptable, I suspect that there is room to deny that allowing for unfelt pains equates to locating pains outside the mind.

In the study of consciousness, there has been much debate as to whether or not consciousness necessarily involves awareness[1], and this dispute strikes me as immediately relevant to the claim that allowing that one can have pain without being aware of it is equivalent to locating pain outside the mind.  Certainly those theorists (epitomized by Dretske) who claim that one can be conscious of a percept without having to be aware of perceiving would want to allow that, although the injured person is failing to notice the pain, the pain was nonetheless present in consciousness (and, thus, present in the mind).  Perhaps the naďve view, rather than locating pain in the body and outside the mind, is like the position Dretske endorses.  That is, perhaps the folk think that an injured person can be conscious of the pain without being aware of the pain.  Perhaps this has no real bearing on the larger project—though I think it may, depending on how we resolve the earlier worry about the connection between secondary qualities and Dennett’s HP—but I would be interested to hear whether (and if not, why not) Justin takes this to be a viable alternative to his explanation of the data.


[1] Cf, Carruthers, P. 1989.  “Brute Experience”.  Journal of Philosophy 86: 258-69. p. 258; Dretske, F.  1993.  “Conscious Experience”.  Mind 102 (406): 263-283; Lycan, W.G. 1995.  Consciousness and Experience.  Cambridge MA: MIT Press; Rosenthal, D. 1997. A Theory of Consciousness in The Nature of Consciousness, eds. Block, Flanagan, and Güzeldere, 729-53.