Radical transparency

Troubles for radical transparency II. Moore s radical transparency... 

I find confirmation of the hypothesis that Campbell is committed to radical transparency in later work promoting what he calls the relational view of experience. In the relational view, experience of an object is a simple relation holding between perceiver and object and the qualitative character of the experience is constituted [emphasis mine] by the qualitative character of the scene perceived.He characterizes the relational view further by saying ... 

In this section and the next, I wish to identify two difficulties for the doctrine of radical transparency. These difficulties may not amount to fatal objections to the doctrine, but I think they are considerations that should give us pause before we accept it. 

Radical transparency is a thesis about perceptual experience, and perceptual experience is experience in which things appear to us to have various features. We might say, then, that Moore was giving us an account of what it is for X to appear F to S, and his answer is this x appears F to S if and only if (i) S is conscious of x (ii) x is F. In clause (i), we refer to what Moore calls the act in clause (ii), we characterize the object. What is distinctive about Moores account is that clause (i) is constant in all types of experience, any differences in how things appear (or what the experience is like) consisting only in what features are possessed by the object of the experience as characterized in clause (ii). ... 

To return, then, to the problematic consequence of radical transparency since the nature of experience is exhausted by a relation between subject and object, a change in the character of one s experience (say, from seeing red to seeing green) is merely a change in one s relations to objects, comparable to what happens to you when the red car next to you in a line of traffic is replaced by a green car. It is not in any way an intrinsic change. ... 

We have now reached a view quite at odds with radical transparency. Objects no longer play an essential role in contributing qualitative character to experiences. The experiences (or their subjects) are the way they are intrinsically, object or no object. The same experience may occur regardless of whether 1 am seeing an apple that is really there or hallucinating one, which implies (for better or worse) that the difference between veridical experience and hallucination must lie in factors extraneous to the experience itself such as causal relations of the experience to environmental objects. 

It appears, then, that Dretske s views are not affected by the difficulties I have raised for radical transparency. They do nonetheless have an implication that some would find problematic, as I shall try to evoke by again citing Thomas Reid. 

In Moores doctrine of radical transparency, experiences are thoroughly relational in a sense implying that a subjects experience is exhausted by what object it has. It is a corollary that a subject has no intrinsic properties whatever just in virtue of undergoing one rather than another kind of experience. 

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