Phenomenal Character Revisited

Bibliographic Data

ID10345875
AuthorsSydney Shoemaker (corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume60
Issue2
Pages465-465
Publication date2000-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8205 • E-ISSN: 1933-1592
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.2307/2653497
OpenAlexW2333423105
LanguageEN
Citations received9

I am grateful to Michael Tye for his discussion of my book, and to the editor for offering me the opportunity to respond to Tye's criticisms of my account of the character of perceptual experience-especially since this prompted reflections that led me to see a way of removing one unattractive feature of the account. The view Tye criticizes in his review is the view I think one must hold if one thinks that the following is a possible case: (1) under the same circumstances, object X looks different to persons A and B with respect to color, and (2) neither A or B is misperceiving X. I take (1) and (2) to imply that X has two different one perceived by A and one perceived by B, and that it is X's (veridically) appearing to them to have these properties that constitutes its looking to them, with respect to color, the ways it does. It is these properties I have called phenomenal properties, and hold to be different from colors (the object having only one color). The character of experiences, I claim, consists in its representing such properties. The case of (1) and (2) I have focused on in previous discussions of this is the hypothetical (and controversial) case of spectrum inversion. But we needn't assume the possibility of spectrum inversion in order to see the need of an account that invokes such properties. We need it, I think, in order to account for actual differences between color perceivers. It is a fact that different people often differ slightly in what lights, and what reflectances, they perceive as unique hues.' What one person perceives as unique blue another may perceive as a slightly greenish blue. This is due to slight differences in the ways their visual systems process visual input. Where there is this sort of difference between two people, there is no basis on which one can say that one of them sees the color of an object correctly and the other is misperceiving it-nothing in the reflectances, or in the light, corresponds to the difference between unique and nonunique hues.2 But the object does look

Character (mathematics · Advanced Image Fusion Techniques · Mathematics · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Visual perception and processing mechanisms

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