Qualia appearance properties

I think there are strong reasons for preferring representationalist accounts of awareness to accounts that are based on acquaintance. Thus, in the first place, representationalist accounts give us some hope of being able to account for the ways that objects of awareness appear to us. In particular, what is especially relevant to our concerns, they afford some hope of our being able to account for the ways that the properties that we call qualia appear to us. These properties seem to us to be intrinsic, seem to be simple (or at least to be analyzable into simple components), seem to support relations of qualitative similarity and qualitative difference, and so on. As noted earlier, representationalist theories of awareness have some promise of explaining why certain objects of awareness seem to us to have these characteristics. 

This is not to deny that it is independently desirable to understand the nature of qualia. It is clear that this is an important goal. I turn now to the task of constmcting such an account. Thus far, all that has been said about visual qualia is that they are appearance properties — or in other words, that they are the properties we are aware of in virtue of participating in facts of the form x looksp F to y. The goal now is to consider the issues that arise when one attempts to go beyond this starting point. 

I am concerned here only to evaluate these traditionally important views. 1 will not go on to present and defend a fifth view. The task of finding an appropriate account of appearance properties seems to me to be one of the hardest, and also one of the most important, of the problems facing the philosophy of perception. My goal in this paper is just to explain some of the issues that must be addressed in any search for a satisfactory view. 1 put forward a positive account of visual qualia in other writings. ... 

Could the first view be correct That is, could appearance properties be properties of internal, mental entities of some sort 1 think we can see that the answer is no by reflecting on the transparency of visual awareness. Visual awareness is transparent in the sense that the only objects that are presented to us in visual awareness are external, physical objects. We are not aware of internal objects of any kind. Now, this implies that any properties we are aware of in visual experience must be properties of external objects. Since we are not aware of any internal objects, we could not be aware of any properties of internal objects unless we were aware of them without being aware of them as characterizing objects, that is, as instantiated. It seems absurd to say that visual experience presents us with properties that are floating free of all objects, as mere possibilities of instantiation. Thus, transparency provides us with a reason to say that appearance properties, and therefore qualia, are properties of external objects. 

To summarize there are problems facing the main traditional views concerning the nature of appearance properties. At present, there is no clear answer to questions about the metaphysical nature of these properties — or, by the same token, to questions about the metaphysical nature of visual qualia. 

As far as I can tell, there is only one theory of experience that provides a satisfactory way of dealing with this problem - representationalism. Rep-resentationalism maintains that our awareness of the characteristics we call qualia essentially involves representations and that the representations in question are different in a variety of respects from the representations that are involved in other forms of cognition. Because of the distinctive features of these representations, it maintains, the properties they represent seem to us to have special features, such as intrinsicness and simplicity, and seem to us to have individual natures that are not captured by scientific accounts of experience. Despite our impressions to the contrary, representationalism asserts, our awareness of qualia is governed by an appearance/reality... 

Representationalism maintains, in other words, that the properties we call qualia do not really have the properties that we take to be constitutive of qualitative character. They only seem to us to have such features because of the peculiarities of the representations in virtue of which we are aware of them. Moreover, if they seem to us to have individual natures that are different from the natures of all physical characteristics, this is because, and only because, they are represented in a unique way. Representationalism adds that we are unable to see beyond these apparent differences, and to appreciate the ultimate identity of the properties we call qualia with certain physical properties, because it is not apparent to us, from the perspective of common sense, that our awareness of them involves representations. Folk psychology does not reveal that representations are constitutively involved in facts of the form x looksp F to y. Accordingly, it does not occur to us that our awareness of the properties we call qualia might be governed by an appearance/reality distinction. We think that it is necessary to take our experience of qualia at face value. 

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