PHENOMENAL PROPERTIES: SOME MODELS FROM PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 1

There are many different notions of "phenomenal property", and these notions differ markedly in logical, semantic, and metaphysical complexity. This paper identifies and analyzes a traditional and relatively simple notion of phenomenal properties, characterizing how the world appears to the senses. I argue that developments in philosophy and experimental psychology have made this notion of phenomenal property eminently precise and empirically tractable. Psychologists have had great success in constructing explanatory models of various modalities of sensory appearance. The strategy and structure of such psychological model building is analyzed in some detail. One element critical to the success of that enterprise is that psychologists have (in effect) confined themselves to explananda describable in the comparative (or relational) forms of the verbs of appearance, while philosophers continue mostly to obsess about the non-comparative senses. The paper shows how five features of philosophical discourse about phenomenal properties can be fruitfully redescribed in relational terms. In the concluding section this traditional and tractable notion of phenomenal properties is contrasted with a more complicated and much less tractable kind. Acknowledgments. I thank Alex Byrne, Mohan Matthen, and Murat Aydede for comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as audiences at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Rutgers University. In most domains philosophers struggle mightily with Reality. Philosophy of perception is one of those exceptional domains in which even murkier and more difficult struggles lie: those that grapple with mere Appearance. This wrestling match began in ancient times and results so far are inconclusive. It has proven difficult to pin an opponent who merely seems to be present. In this paper I want to describe one line of development, occurring mostly within the twentieth century, that identifies one subset of opponents within this competition against whom some progress is possible. It is a rather important and central subset, but there is no denying that it is a subset; other denizens of appearance are left untouched by the stratagems herein proposed. Nevertheless I think it is progress, worth noting and analyzing, to separate apparent wheat from apparent chaff. In particular I will analyze one relatively simple kind of "phenomenal property", distinguish it from some of its more complex cousins, and show how this simpler kind has proven to be a tractable target for empirical investigation in experimental psychology. The cost of opening a notion to empirical investigation is that elements of the conventional wisdom about that notion might be empirically disconfirmed, and I shall argue that this is precisely what has happened with this tractable variety of phenomenal property. In particular, I shall argue, these properties have been and must be firmly dissociated from any ties to consciousness. Clark Phenomenal properties 2