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Toward an objective phenomenological vocabulary: how seeing a scarlet red is like hearing a trumpet’s blare

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Abstract

Nagel’s challenge is to devise an objective phenomenological vocabulary that can describe the objective structural similarities between aural and visual perception. My contention is that Charles Sanders Peirce’s little studied and less understood phenomenological vocabulary makes a significant contribution to meeting this challenge. I employ Peirce’s phenomenology to identify the structural isomorphism between seeing a scarlet red and hearing a trumpet’s blare. I begin by distinguishing between the vividness of an experience and the intensity of a quality. I proceed to identify further points of structural isomorphism (a) between the experience of seeing a scarlet red and of hearing a trumpet blare and (b) between the qualities of those experiences. Lastly, I gesture towards how these distinctions can be an aid in describing what it is like to be a bat.

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Notes

  1. In the passage, Peirce does not recall which Scottish psychologist, speculating it might be Thomas Reid or Dugald Stewart. However, Reid is more sympathetic to the claim that seeing scarlet is like hearing a trumpet’s blare. See Reid's (1769) Inquiry into the Human Mind, 6, §2. (Though see also Essay III, Chapter Six of Reid's (1803) Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind, Volume 3.) Stewart mentions the issue in Philosophical Essays, Essay First, Chapter First, apparently in agreement with Locke. Also, Adam Smith sides with Locke. See Smith's (1795) section on seeing in “Of the External Senses” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects.

  2. These issues are at the heart of Husserl’s published works (1960 and 1983, to mention but two of central importance) and are explored carefully and insightfully throughout the works of many “continental” phenomenologists, including Heidegger (1996) and Merleau-Ponty (1964, 1968), to mention but two other theorists among many worthy of study. For essays on these topics by “analytic” phenomenologists, see Noë (2007), Dennett (2003, 2007), and Lutz and Thompson (2003), to mention but a few. For works on this topic from a Peircean perspective, see DeTienne (2000, 2004), Short (2007, 2008), and Atkins (2012, 2013).

  3. Though for essays in “analytic” phenomenology focused on this issue, see O’Regan et al. (2004, 2005), O’Regan and Noë (2001), and Thompson (2005), to mention but four of many worth careful study.

  4. It might reasonably be asked on what grounds such a supposition should be made. Perhaps, after all, bats have no experiences.

    To begin, there can be little doubt that bats have experiences in at least one sense of that word: they receive information about the world around them by virtue of sense organs like eyes and ears. Otherwise, we should find it difficult to explain how they survive.

    Of course, the issue at hand here is whether bats have phenomenally conscious experiences. The literature on this issue is voluminous (for a sampling, see Carruthers 1998, Baars 2005, and Dennett 1995) and addressing it lies outside the purview of the present paper. Nonetheless, I shall make two points. First, it can hardly be denied that the hypothesis that other mammals (especially monkeys and apes but also dogs, cats, and bats) have phenomenally conscious experiences is the much more natural hypothesis, both because of similarities in behavior and brain anatomy and because we just do attribute such experiences to them.

    Second and more importantly, even if it should be found that bats do not enjoy phenomenally conscious experiences of echolocation we can still ask what it would be like to have such phenomenally conscious experiences. To answer that question, we would still need to devise an objective phenomenological vocabulary and to stipulate that such experiences have echolocative-quality.

  5. In a study of children 1 year of age, M. Beth Casey notes, “The developing infant is constantly required to respond to differences between the forms or shapes of objects in the environment, but colors are not generally as important” (1979: 341). As a result, form problems are solved at an earlier age than color problems. Casey found that “a form problem was much easier for infants to learn than a color problem. …The analysis showed that none of the color subjects reached criterion (0 out of 24) whereas 46% of the form subjects learned (11 out of 24)” (342).

  6. Someone might wonder whether ordinary experience really distinguishes between the intensity of a color and the vividness of an experience. Is this, properly speaking, a phenomenological distinction? On the one hand, it is clear that in the immediately lived phenomenal experience we do not find such a distinction. This is especially true on Peirce’s view, for the phenomenon is originally one, a synthetic unity. On the other hand, when we engage in phenomenological analysis, we are analyzing what is originally a whole by distinguishing, for example, between the “internal” and “external” elements of an experience (or in Husserlian terms the noetic and noematic moments. For an exposition of this with respect to Peirce and related problems regarding presupposition, see Atkins (2012, 2013). It is in this sense that we can make a phenomenological distinction between the vividness of an experience and intensity of a quality.

  7. Peirce’s references to quantities of qualities shall be explained below.

  8. As Peirce would say, they involve Secondness.

  9. By “immediate” here I mean temporally immediate. We may exercise involuntary mental power over objects of perception when, for example, our knowledge of the color of an object leads us to see the object that color even when it is achromatic (see Hansen et. al. 2006). Also, we may exercise indirect mental power over objects of perception when, for example, we alter our desires so as to alter the way an object appears to us. Finally, we may exercise temporally mediate mental power over objects of experience by waiting, for example, until our mood changes (see Barrick et al. 2002).

  10. Perceptuation is not to be confused with perception, though the term derives from being like or akin to perception. Obsessive thoughts involve perceptuation but are not perceptions for they are forceful in the way that percepts are. Nonetheless, obsessive thoughts differ from perceptions, first, with respect to their content (obsessive thoughts must have propositional content and perceptions need not) and, second, with respect to the sort of effort that we can exert on them (obsessive thoughts cannot be changed by bodily effort but are, to some degree, tractable with mental effort whereas perceptions cannot be changed with mental effort but can be changed with bodily effort).

  11. Interesting borderline cases worth exploring—cases that are highly vivid, involve perceptuation, and are not susceptible to mental effort—are flashbacks. Suffers of flashbacks sometimes report their experiences to be very much like perceptual experiences. See Milo (1997).

  12. O’Regan, Myin, and Noë have also suggested that corporality and alerting capacity might be the same as Hume’s vividness and Husserl’s Leibhaftigkeit, or bodily presence or enfleshedness. I think this is a mistake, as is already implied in my discussion of vividness and externisensation, for vividness is a feeling of a degree of force and externisensation is the degree force of volitionally internal and volitionally external elements. But I also think that Husserl’s Leibhaftigkeit is different from vividness. After all, dreams, hallucinations, and even some imaginings can be very vivid. However, they can lack bodily presence, for even when one is suffering them, one can know that the object is not “there.” I suspect that (but cannot here defend that) Leibhaftigkeit is actually a function of three different elements: vividness, perceptuation, and reality, the fact that when we try to change the non-ego by direct mental effort it resists mightily and persistently. This is akin to how color is a function of three different elements: hue, chroma, and luminosity.

  13. An interesting borderline case in this respect is the illusion of Schröder’s Stair, which can appear to be ascending or descending. Here, we do seem to be able to alter the object of perception by way of mental effort. Peirce considers this to be an example of where perception shades into abduction, a kind of Thirdness (1998: 228ff.). However, I shall not explore this issue here as it is not directly relevant to the issue of seeing a scarlet red and hearing a trumpet’s blare. Rather, the perception of a staircase as ascending or as descending parallels seeing a scarlet as red or hearing a trumpet as blaring.

  14. Though, to be sure, not the whole.

  15. It is also true of mathematical facts. No matter how hard we try to make the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle not equal to the sum of the square of its sides, we fail. However, in mathematical proofs, we cannot exert bodily effort to change our experience of the proof.

  16. Hue is the variation of the color with respect to its possession of green, blue, yellow, and red. Chroma is the variation of the color with respect to grey. Luminosity is the degree to which the color surface seems to reflect light. Peirce focused on these three aspects of color as defining colors, but more refined color theories have distinguished among these and other features.

  17. Hue and timbre vary on different axes whereas luminosity and loudness vary along one axis.

  18. Hues vary discretely with respect to each other and the timbres of various instruments vary discretely with respect to each other. Luminosity and chroma vary serially.

  19. My explanation differs slightly from Peirce’s for he claims that qualities may vary serially or in different directions and of those that vary serially, they vary either discretely or continuously. However, it seems to me more accurate to say that some vary along one axis (serially) and others along many (in different directions). But the individual axes may be either discrete steps or continuous. For example, colors vary along many axes (hue, luminosity, and chroma). Along the axis of hues, the steps are discrete (green, red, blue, and yellow). However, the degree to which a color possesses the hue varies continuously.

  20. Moreover, even if there are no such things as colors (if an error theory about color is true), an artist is still able to distinguish among these features of her experience of colors.

  21. Someone might worry that if experiences are cognitively penetrable, then there is little reason to believe that we have objective experiences of qualities of qualities. However, even if visual experiences are penetrable, uncoerced consistency arises among those trained in observation, even across successive generations. On the one hand, cognitive penetrability may imply that there is little reason to think my particular experiences are of the way the world really is. That may very well be true, though we would not want to carry this too far as it may have skeptical results. On the other hand, intersubjective agreement in describing the phenomenon, that agreement arising from phenomenological description of the structures of experience, is a mark of objectivity. That sort of agreement is what arises among artists, sommeliers, and astronomers who are trained in distinguishing among various features of their subjective experiences.

  22. It may seem odd that high intensity in cold, phenomenologically, does not map directly onto the physical properties that underlie heat, for heat is identified as a high mean kinetic molecular energy and cold is identified as low mean kinetic molecular energy. Yet intensity may also be measured in terms of deviation from the norm. Objects very hot and objects very cold strongly deviate from the norm, room temperature. Hence, they are both thermally intense, phenomenologically speaking.

  23. I should point out that some humans do use echolocation, but (1) most of us have not cultivated the ability and (2) bat ears are specialized to hear in the ultrasonic range. So, bat experiences must be unlike the experiences of most humans and, when they are not, qualitatively unlike human echolocative experiences.

    With respect to (1), I doubt many of us have met a person who uses echolocation to navigate his or her environment. I certainly never have. However, humans have learned to do so, perhaps most notably Daniel Kish and Ben Underwood. Recent studies have suggested that their ability recruits parts of the brain typically used for vision (Thaler et al. 2011).

    With respect to (2), the discovery that bats emit frequencies in the ultrasonic range and use their echoes to navigate is credited to Donald R. Griffin, who presented his discovery at a 1940 meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science. Prior to Griffin’s discovery, it was believed that bats navigated by way of feeling changes in air pressure on their sensitive wings (Mohr 1976: 13). Current research has identified adaptations in bat’s cochlea as accounting for their ability to hear in the ultrasonic range (for a summary of this research, see Vater 1988).

  24. Scientific studies of echolocation show that echoes encode much more information than size. Schnitzler and Kalko state, “target properties such as size, form, material, depth and angular extension, and texture are encoded in the complex temporal and spectral parameters of an echo” (1998: 184). It is also believed that bats distinguish insect prey based on changes in amplitude of the echo as a result of the flutter of the prey’s wings (Schnitzler 1987). This supports my point that the echolocative-quality must involve qualities of qualities, and that that both distance and size will be qualities of the echolocative-quality. As these studies show, there will be many other qualities of the echolocative-quality, just as there are many qualities of qualities of a trumpet’s blare.

  25. The final version of this paper is deeply indebted to the comments of two anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this paper was presented at Iona College, and comments received there greatly improved it.

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Atkins, R.K. Toward an objective phenomenological vocabulary: how seeing a scarlet red is like hearing a trumpet’s blare. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 837–858 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9288-5

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