Everybody Hates My Unicorn
I’ve been developing an argument against both higher-order and first-order representational theories of consciousness (hereafter HOR and FOR, respectively). I call the argument the Unicorn and so far everybody (but me) hates it. To constructively focus the hate on a single blog post (instead of a longish paper draft), I briefly summarize here.
First, some quick and dirty definitions of my targets:
HOR – The property of being a conscious state consists in being a represented state.
FOR – The property of being phenomenal consists in being a represented property.
And now…the Unicorn:
P1. Things that don’t exist don’t instantiate properties.
P2. We represent things that don’t exist.
P3. Representing something does not suffice to confer a property to that thing.
C1. Representing a state does not suffice to confer the property of being conscious to that state (so HOR is false).
C2. Representing a property does not suffice to confer the property of being phenomenal to that property (so FOR is false).
That’s the argument. Here are some quick notes on it.
N1. Re: P1, cheetahs, not unicorns, are the fastest animals. This is not because unicorns have the property of being slow. This is because they have no properties whatsoever.
N2. Re: P2, if contrary to P2, we don’t represent things that don’t exist, then P2 is meaningless since it would represent nothing at all (it wouldn’t represent so-called people-who-represent-things-that-don’t-exist). P2, however, is not meaningless. Therefore, it’s true.
N3. Re: P3, it follows from P1 and P2. I don’t think it takes a lot of fancy work to show that it does, so I won’t bother.
N4. Re: P4, mutatis mutandis for how C1 and C2 follow from P3.
N5. HOR and FOR can’t dodge the Unicorn by simply adding existence to the list of criteria for consciousness/phenomenality. The key question HOR and FOR address is “in what consists the property of being conscious/phenomenal?†The problems the Unicorn raises for the answer “it consists in being represented†cannot be solved by requiring the existence of the representational target, since existence is not a property. Not being a property, existence adds nothing in “being represented and existing†not already present in plain old “being representedâ€. I take it that something like this dodge is at work in so-called same-order representational theories of consciousness (SOR). It (and they) won’t work.
Fig 1. Don’t hate me, hate my unicorn. (Photo by Ray Gunn.)
Fig 2. This is not my unicorn. (Photo source: http://www.fortgreenepups.org/03/images/unicorn.jpg )
September 18th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
I want more on the move from P1 & P2 to P3. Presumably some sort of parity argument: Representing X (which doesn’t exist) can’t confer a property on X (because things that don’t exist don’t have properties); therefore by parity of reasoning representing Y (which happens to exist) can’t confer a property on Y.
Try this:
P1. People who don’t exist can’t win elections.
P2. A majority can vote for someone who doesn’t exist.
P3. Therefore, a majority’s voting for someone does not ensure that person’s victory.
Not a perfect parallel, I know, but perhaps enough to show there’s something fishy in your argument?
September 18th, 2006 at 8:09 pm
I have no background in this area, so I apologize if this is stupid, but I really fail to see how you get P1 in the first place.
Intiutively, a thing that doesn’t exist can’t instantiate properties in itself, but P1 still isn’t self-evident in that a thing that doesn’t exist might instantiate properties in something else. It seems that claim can defend FOR against the unicorn. The representation of a nonexistent thing instantiates properties in the mind/brain that’s doing the representing. So unicorns don’t have the property of being thought about, but the mind/brain has the property of thinking about unicorns.
(I’m really not sure what that does to Rosenthal’s theory mentioned in your draft, as I’m not familiar with it. I guess at bottom this is similar to the first revision to HOR noted in your draft on pg. 7.)
Actually, on reading the rest of your draft, I’m not sure how the unicorn is an objection to FOR. For instance, your unicorn seems not to cause any problem to Dretske’s claim, as you’ve stated it in your draft (again, not familiar with this area) at all. As for Tye’s account, well, it might have to be revised to suggest that being phenomenonal consists in instantiating representations of oneself. Eh?
September 19th, 2006 at 10:22 am
I’m verging on buying this, but I have a question about premises one and two. How would you represent those in the predicate calculus (especially considering your denial that existence is a property)?
P1) For all x if x doesn’t exist then it’s not the case that there is a P such that Px?
P2) There is an x such that x doesn’t exist and we represent it?
I don’t think these can be turned into well formed formulas unless you treat ‘exists’ as a predicate.
And of course, we all know, that what can’t be expressed in the predicate calculus is LITERALLY NONSENSE!!!!!!!!!!!
September 19th, 2006 at 10:34 am
Eric,
Thanks, once again, for excellent comments.
Regarding the inference from my P1 and P2 to P3, I am assuming that for the relevant class of conditionals, if you can have A without B then it is false that if A then B. So, for example, if you can have bipedalism without humanity, then it is false that being bipedal suffices for being human. And this is true of even instances of the co-occurence of bipedialism and humanity: I am two-footed and a human but it is still false that I am a human in virtue of being two-footed. Call my assumption about the relevant conditionals assumption Q. P2 gives you the A (representing inexistents) and P1 gives you the not B (representeds not having properties). P1, P2, and Q give you P3.
Regarding your P1, P2, and P3 — the voting argument — I think it is relevantly analogous to mine, but I don’t see that there’s anything fishy with either. I’m having a hard time seeing how, in the voting argument, P1 and P2 can both be true while P3 false without equivocating on what voting for someone means in P2 and P3. What I have in mind here is that if in P2 and P3 “voting for someone” just means something like casting a ballot, then P2 and P3 are going to wind up true. And if “voting for someone” means “there exists an x such that a ballot is cast for them” then P2 is going to come out false (because contradictory).
September 19th, 2006 at 10:50 am
Paul, I think you raise good points. In fact, you may be surprised on how much we actually agree on. Most importantly, I totally agree that “unicorns don’t have the property of being thought about, but the mind/brain has the property of thinking about unicorns.” Note, however, that the quoted propostion is totally consistent with P1. You are right that, re HOR, this amounts to the first revision of HOR from my paper.
Regarding FOR, there may be revised FOR’s that survive, indeed, my own theory of consciousness is arguably one of them. But the quoted proposition is devastating to unrevised FOR and this includes Dretske’s as well as Tye’s formulations. Crucial for both of those guys are claims like “qualia ain’t in the head” and “phenomenal character is not a property of mental states”. Crucial for both are claims like, when I perceive a red tomato, the so-called character of my experience is a property of the tomato thereby experienced: the redness instantiated by the tomato.
September 19th, 2006 at 11:05 am
Hey Pete, here are few thoughts…
If the issue that those theories (HOR) and (TOR) try to address is: “In what consist the property of X to be conscious/phenomenal?”, then obviously they are talking about X that exists and which can have certain property (of being conscious or being phenomenal).
So, any answer will have existential import implied in the question, and when mentioning X in the answer, it will be X which exists.
Further if we agree that
(D): If X is represented, and X exists, then X has property of being represented (and ignore the situation of “X is represented, but X doesn’t exist”)
Now, depending of what kind of reading we give to “consist in” there are two cases:
1)If “X consist in Y”, means “X implies Y”:
X being conscious/phenomenal implies X being represented, seem OK to me, given existential import, and (D)
2)If on other side “X consist in Y” means “Y implies X”
X being represented implies X being conscious/phenomenal, then as you say, it would be wrong, as it is not clear if X exists.
September 19th, 2006 at 11:11 am
Tad, you raise some nice challenges. Tell me if you think the following kind of response shows promise.
I think the challenge can be met while treating existence quantificationally. The trick will involve quantifying over predicates and/or sentences. So claims like P2 could turn into something like
P2*. There exist sentences like “There exists an x such that it is horned and it is horsey” which are false.
Claims like P1 should be relatively trivial along the lines of
P1*. It is not the case that there exists anything that false sentences like “There exists an x such that it is horned and it is horsey” are true of.
September 19th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Oops, I just figured out I used same variable “X” and in both talking the meaning of “X consist in Y”, and the concrete issue at hand…
I guess it is clear, but to remove any possibility of misunderstanding in “X consist in Y”,”X implies Y” and “Y implies X”, instead X and Y, I should have used A and B.
September 19th, 2006 at 11:26 am
Pete -
I kind of thought you’d have to go metalinguistic. It’s no surprise I suppose, since you are making claims about representation.
September 19th, 2006 at 11:27 am
Pete -
I kind of thought you’d have to go metalinguistic. It’s no surprise I suppose, since you are making claims about representation. But I know too little about logic and Tarski and the rest of it to say anything useful about it. Is Chase listening in?
September 19th, 2006 at 11:33 am
Tad, funny your remark about Chase. While I was typing out my reply to you I was thinking “I bet Chase is going to swoop in and school me.”
Brain Hammer to Wrenn, this is Brain Hammer to Wrenn, do you read me? Over.
September 19th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Hey Pete,
So I think you know that I hate your unicorn and I can agree that that does not mean that your unicorn has the property of being hated by me (because it doesn’t exist) but I still don’t see why my hate isn’t about your unicorn and why that isn’t enough to foil the argument…
Do you think that the same argument shows that nothing has the property of being percieved? If not then you do not have an general argument against the transitivity principle but only against one way of instantiating it (viz higher order thoughts)…
As to the entailment of P3 can you say some more about why a move likeTanasije’s won’t work (I take it this is what you mean by saying that we cannot simply require the existence of the state to avoid your argument)…also Rosenthal himself seems to make a move similar to this when he says that there is no difference between saying that the target state does not exist and saying that the HOT misrepresents some other occurent first-order state….
And lastly do you ever address the Kripkean worry that no one ever thinks about (and A Fortiori never represents) unicorns in the first place? It seems to me that if a Kripke-style causal theory of semantics for mental terms is correct then you do not get the A and not-B which falsifies ‘If I represnt X then X has the property of being represented’
September 19th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Thanks Tanasije, I think your remarks go right to the heart of the issue. Let me see if the following is useful.
I totally agree when you write
If the issue …is: “In what consist the property of X to be conscious/phenomenal?â€, then obviously they are talking about X that exists and which can have certain property (of being conscious or being phenomenal).
However, I disagree that it follows that “any answer will have existential import implied in the question, and when mentioning X in the answer, it will be X which exists” unless this is supposed to be read as “any good answer must have existential import…”. And this is why I think the kinds of representationalist answers that HOR and FOR give are bad answers: they don’t have the requisite existential import. because representing x does not imply the existence of x.
I have a big problem with your propostion D, namely, that it depends on there being such a property as the property of being represented. I don’t think there are any good reasons for believing in such a property. What ever representing consists in, it has to be something that representations of unicorns (of things that don’t exist) have in common with representations of goats (of things that do exist). In neither case is does representation involve a relation to the so-called thing represented.
I think that expressions like “representation of a unicorn” are importantly analgous to expressions like the idiom “kicked the bucket” which means “died” and implies no relation to any bucket. Kicking the bucket never entails a relation to a bucket, even in cases where the deceased literally kicked a bucket. Suppose Joe was walking barefoot and accidentally kicked the sharp edge of a metal bucket coated in a poison that kills him immediately. Even though Joe kicked the bucket in both the idomatic and literal senses of the phrase, the applicability of the literal sense of the phrase does not follow from or consist in the applicability of the idiomatic sense of the phrase.
In the idiomatic sense of “kicking the bucket”, since it is something you can do even when no bucket exists, then “kicking the bucket” in the idiomatic sense is not something that you do to a bucket even in situtations wherein there happens to be a bucket.
By analogy, representing a unicorn is not something you are doing to a unicorn, even if there happened to exist a unicorn.
September 19th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
About “any answer will have existential import implied in the question”, yes, I wasn’t precise enough. I meant answer in sense of explanation in form of “X is …”.
Seems to me if we ask “what is X?”, the answer in form of “X is…” will have existential import. But in giving general account, yes, it doesn’t follow.
That’s why I distinguished the two propositions. Does “being conscious/phenomenal consist in being representation”, means
1: X being conscious/phenomenal imples X being representation (where it seems to me there would be existential import)
or 2: X being representation implies X being conscious/phenomenal (where there isn’t existential import)
If those theories say 2, then I agree with you, that they can’t ignore the possibility of X not existing.
So would you say that 2 is the case with these theories?
September 20th, 2006 at 2:18 am
Tanasije, I’m not exactly sure I understand your question, so forgive me if the following doesn’t sufficiently address your concerns.
I take it that “consists in” could just as well be replaced with “is identical to”. Thus, “X consists in Y” could just as well be replaced with “X both implies and is implied by Y”.
I take it that the crucial issue concerning HOR and FOR is whether being conscious/phenomenal is identical to being represented. And my argument is desinged to show that such theses are incorrect. My argument leaves open whether being conscious/phenomenal is identical to being a represententation, which, by the way, is (pretty close to) something I actually agree with.
September 20th, 2006 at 2:40 am
Richard, Thanks for your points and questions. Hopefully the following addresses them.
Re: aboutness. I have no problem with aboutness. I’m happy affirming that your hate is about my unicorn.
Re: perception. I think only existents are perceived. HOP and FOP would thereby be immune to the Unicorn.
Re: the denial of thoughts about inexistents. . A Russellian analysis like the one I suggested in my above response to Tad’s request for some predicate logic strikes me as adequate for these issues about consciousness and compatible with a causal-semantics for the predicates.
September 20th, 2006 at 7:47 am
How about this modification of P3, in my voting argument:
P3. Therefore, a majority’s voting for someone who exists does not ensure that person’s victory.
Now can I have P1, P2, and -P3, and still retain a sufficient parallel with your unicorn argument? (Setting aside questions about Diebold!)
I’m also having thoughts about “disjunctive” accounts of representational content: E.g., the representational content of a mental state is the object itself when the object exists but something else (or nothing) when the object doesn’t exist. If such disjunctive views are coherent, maybe there’s a similar disjunctivist reply to your unicorn?
September 20th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Thanks for the explanation Pete.
Sorry for me being slow, but let me see if I got the argument right…
If F(x) if something like metalinguistic formulation that you proposed to Tad of the “we represent X” proposition, and if P is property of being phenomenal/conscious, then the theories can’t say:
F(x)=>Px
, because x might not exist.
(btw that’s why I asked for explanation of “consist of”, because Px=>F(x) would not have problems)
But if the F(x) is metalinguistic and can handle the possibility of non-existence of x, then adding the criteria of existence of x, does seem to add something new. Seems to me:
F(x) and “x exists” => Px
wouldn’t have problems.
September 21st, 2006 at 4:04 am
Tanasije,
F(x) and “x exists†=> Px
would have problems. I take it that for HOR and FOR, Px is supposed to follow from “F(x) and “x exists”" because what’s on both sides of the arrow is the same property (thus all the “consists in” talk). However, since existence is not a property, you can subtract existence and have the same property, giving you
F(x) => Px
which, as you point, out is problematic (because x might not exist).
September 21st, 2006 at 4:28 am
Eric,
Your revision runs into the problem I tried to handle in my N5 from the post. Let me try to spell it out in a different way: Suppose that your P3 is false (-P3). Note what it is, then, that ensures victory. It is not being voted for. It’s being voted for plus existing. But what does the property of being victorious consist in? What ever the answer is, we should be able to subtract “existing” from it and have the same answer, since existence is not a property. The answer then becomes “being voted for”. But this is a bad answer, since if inexistent candidates can be voted for then “being voted for” is not a property they (or anyone) has.
Re: disjunctive accounts. I’ve never liked them much but I admit I haven’t thought a whole lot about them in connection with the Unicorn or anything else. I pretty much assume what I guess the disjunctivist questions: there can be subjectively indistinguishable mental states that nonetheless differ in their accuracy.
September 21st, 2006 at 9:35 am
Thanks for the clarification Pete,
So if you are happry to admit that my hate is about your unicorn then the unicorn doe not threaten a version of HOT theory like Rosenthal’s, N’est pas? On his account what makes a state a conscious state is that there be a HOT that is about it (in the specific way that it represents oneself as being in that state)
Isn’t your claiming that HOP and FOP (is there such a thing?) are immune to the unicorn essentially to do what you claim the HOR theorist can’t do? (viz. require existence)
Lastly, I love Russell as much as the next guy (maybe more) but I don’t see how you have Russelled your way out of the Kripkean objection. If Kripke is right then we don’t represent unicorns so much as misrepresent some goat or other (the one in which the usuage of ‘unicorn’ is grounded)…so those Russellian sentences have the right truth values but nit because we represent an inexistent; the misrepresented goat then DOES have the property of being thought about…
September 21st, 2006 at 10:17 am
Richard,
Re: aboutness. I don’t understand your point about aboutness at all. Why can’t I admit that there are such things as “thoughts about unicorns”?
Re: existence. I don’t have a blanket prohibition on existence requirements. Genuine relations, for example require existence in the following sense: I can’t stand next to something unless it exists. If perception is similarly relational then HOPs and FOPs are not targetted by the Unicorn.
Re: Kripke. What’s the actual argument that unicorns aren’t ever represented? Is there one?
September 21st, 2006 at 11:16 am
Thanks for helping me out on this, Pete. I still don’t like your unicorn, though I think you yourself are great!
I don’t think you have to treat existence as a “property” (in any objectionable sense) to allow both that one can vote for non-existent candidates and that *for candidates who actually exist* being voted for by the majority is sufficient for their being elected. It’s just that in saying that being voted for by the majority is sufficient for being elected, we are assuming as a background condition, that the candidate actually exists.
This style of thinking has the following in common with disjunctivist accounts of content: BOth take as a background condition that the thing being seen (or whatever) actually exists; and then they have to tell a different story about the weird cases in which it doesn’t. (I don’t think, by the way, that all disjunctivists would insist there must always be a subjective difference between veridical and nonveridical perceptions.
September 21st, 2006 at 12:56 pm
That’s funny, I thought we had been over this before….but here goes…on R’s view a conscous state is one that we are conscious of; we become conscious of something when we percieve it or have a thought about it (as being present)…so it would seem that even though unicorns do not have the property of being thought about we can nonetheless become conscious of them (by having a suitable thought about them). If this is right then we can see that R’s theory does not consist in “conferring a property” to a non-conscious state: Rather what the story is is that we have a state that represents ourselves as being in a certain state (again this DOES NOT mean that I simply represent the state, it means that I represent MYSELF as BEING in the state, which is very different).
RE perception: Does this mean you deny that perception is in any way representational?
RE Kripke: You bet there is an arguemnt, it goes like this: Read Naming and Necessity
September 21st, 2006 at 12:58 pm
DAGNABIT! I made the same italics error!! Sorry
September 21st, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Eric, thanks for the kind words. You ain’t so bad yourself!
We still aren’t in any agreement on this existence issue, but now I’m starting to think that what we really disagree on here is sufficiency, not existence. If A alone is insufficient for B, but against a backdrop assumption of C it is, then I’d say we have the following situation: A and C jointly but not severally suffice for B. If an attribution of sufficiency is correct only under a certain range of conditions, I think it’s fine to go on saying A suffices for B, but there remains a pretty clear sense in which A does not suffice for B, namely the sense in which it does not alone suffice for B.
To relate this to my bucket example in my earlier response to Tanasije, in the senses of sufficiency relevant to FOR and HOR (some kind of non-causal logical or metaphysical sense of sufficiency), since one can “kick the bucket” without there being any bucket, no one’s “kicking the bucket” ever (alone) suffices for anything to happen to any bucket, even if one were to have a fatal accident in a bucket factory.
September 21st, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Hey Richard,
Re: aboutness. Sorry to go back in circles.
Re: perception. It’s representational. Also, its factive. I buy a classic causal-representational theory of perception.
Re: Kripke. My recollection of Naming and Necessity is that its about Naming (and Necessity). If N&N is correct, you can’t Russell names. But it remains open that you can Russell other kinds of representational contents. I don’t have to go reread N and N because I don’t have to think that unicorn thoughts involve names.
September 21st, 2006 at 2:31 pm
No problem, circles are fun (especially on Day-Quil ;^)
So, do you agree that this line gets around the unicorn? Essentially the move is to accept the unicorn conclusion that unicorns don’t get any properties, but to counter that WE get properties, so too in the case of HOT’s no property is conferred to the state, rather the individual gets a new property (i.e. the property of being conscious of a certain state)
Re perception: OK cool I think I do too, but then why/how do you disagree with Eric’s disjunctivist move?
And finally, ‘unicorn’ is a name! It is the name of a species…so again no Russelling allowed!!!
September 21st, 2006 at 2:45 pm
Richard,
What you describe gets around the Unicorn, but as I argue in the paper, fails to implement TP..but I think we’ve been over that before…
Re: disjunctivism. I think there are lots of cases where subjectivily indistinguishable states differ in whether what they represents exists or not. I doubt this really is an argument, though. I’m probably just begging some crucial question against disjunctivism. I don’t know much about it. Just don’t like it.
Re: names. shmames. Whatever. “unicorn” is not a Logically Proper Name, which I thought was the crucial issue between the causal guys versus the descriptivists. Maybe Kripke’s got a point about “Aristotle” not being a description, but as far as I can tell, “Unicorn” may unproblematically be regarded as meaning a description like “horse with a horn”. At least, I’m not aware of what the problem is supposed to be. But I don’t want to read that book again any time soon. Maybe in the Spring of 2008 I’ll teach it or something. But not now.
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:22 am
I looked at the paper again and I do not see where you argue that this kind of move fails to implement the transitivity principle. I AM NOT suggesting that the HOT itself is the conscious state! I am suggesting that ‘thinking about’ conferrs properties to the individual, and in particular a HOT conferrs the property of ‘being conscious of a first order state’…how does this fail to implement TP?
WOW, you REALLY need to refresh yourself on N&N!!! You don’t see what the problem is supposed to be construeing ‘unicorn’ as ‘horse with a horn’? You should look at the passages where Kripke talks about tigers, and why ‘tiger’ cannot be given a descriptivist account (e.g. p119-121,127, & 134)
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:39 am
Richard,
The failure to implement TP arises because of the failure to implement intransitive state consciousness which in turn fails because states that don’t exist don’t have any properties. But as we said before, this is just going back in circles, so let’s not.
I think we are getting sidetracked about the unimportant issue of “unicorn”. The relevant question here is whether there can be representations of things that don’t exist. My argument that there can be is given in my N2 in my post.
September 22nd, 2006 at 6:52 am
I agree, let’s not rehash that stuff! I think it is obvious that there is no problem in that area because as R says there really is not a difference between saying that the target state does not exist and saying that the HOT misrepresents an existing state. As far as I know you have never addressed this point…but this does not address the argument I have been making…to repeat: it is not simply that I am conscious of a certain state. It is that I am conscious of MYSELF as BEING in a certain state. It seems to me reasonably obvious that I can be conscious of myself as being in a state that I am not actually in….SO what it is to be in a conscious state is that I am conscious of myself as being in that state, this does not confer some property to the state but rather, again, confers a property to ME. I come to have the property of being conscious of myself as being in a certain state, and this is exactly what the transitivity principle says. You should not have a problem with any of this because you have already said that you think that we can have thoughts about unicorns and so I can be conscious of unicorns. Thus the unicron is irrelevant to HOR theories.
If this is right then I do not see any problem with going on to say that the target state (whether accurately represented or not) does come to have the property of being conscious. It is not, as you argue is problematic, that representing the state gives it some property. Rather, I have the property of being conscious of myself as being in a certain state (by representing myself as being in that state) and that makes the state (whether accurately represented or not) a conscious state (or have the property of being consious). So why doesn’t this castrate the unicorn?
According to the Kripke line, what we are thinking about depends on the actual causal-historical heratige of the ‘terms’ in the thought. Thus if (as is one theory postulates) the myth about unicorns has it roots in some villager seeing a malformed goat, then when we think about unicorns we are really thinking about some malformed goat, which did exist. We think we are thinking about something that does not exist, but we are wrong . Another way to put the point is to say that we don’t represent non-existent objects so much as MISREPRESENT some object that really did exist. So also in response to your N2. This line of argument should appeal to anyone who is an actualist about possibility….
September 22nd, 2006 at 7:04 am
Richard,
Using Kripke to save Rosenthal is pretty damn funny. Note the tension between:
“there really is not a difference between saying that the target state does not exist and saying that the HOT misrepresents an existing state”
and
“we don’t represent non-existent objects so much as MISREPRESENT some object that really did exist”
Antoher thing about the Kripke stuff, I don’t see it as a general argument against the impossiblity of representing inexistents. And it would need to be if it is going to cut ice against my argument.
September 22nd, 2006 at 7:47 am
Oh I thought you realized that these were two seperate arguments. One is the kind of response that I think Rosenthal would give, the other more the kind of response that I would give but that really does not matter, the point is that they are BOTH objections to the unicorn…and my point about the Kripke stuff was that there was a Kripke-style objection to the unicorn which you have never replied to.
September 24th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
[…] Apparently Everybody Hates Pete Mandik’s Unicorn. Back off the little guy, will ya! He never hurt anyone! The so-called Unicorn is actually a nice, concise argument against both “higher order” and “first order” representational theories of consciousness via the fact that we represent non-existent things. I like me some concise arguments. Courtesy of Brain Hammer. […]
September 27th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Please forgive my being so late to the party. I was busy hitting people up for grants and tenure.
Tad’s intuition that we should worry about formalizing the Unicorn is right on the money — as everyone already knew *I’d* say. Here’s the short version of the fruits of my efforts:
If you try to formalize the Unicorn, you immediately face the question of whether to quantifier over things that do not exist. If you don’t answer the question, you might not see the Unicorn for the goat it is. If you do answer the question, then the Unicorn’s goat-nature becomes evident.
First, suppose we steadfastly refuse to quantify over things that don’t exist. P1 and P2 present no problems. We simply paraphrase P1 as the equivalent:
P1*. Whatever has a property exists
and symbolize using ‘x=x’ as proxy for ‘x exists’ (which works so long you don’t quantify over things that don’t exist):
P1**. (x)(P)(P is a property and x has P -> x=x)
P2 is also easy. Call a representation that purports but fails to refer a “vacuous representation.” We paraphrase P2 with the equivalent:
P2*. There are vacuous representations.
and symbolize:
P2**. ($x)(x is a vacuous representation)
Then we hit P3. It says, “Representing something does not suffice to confer a property to that thing.” This does not follow from P1** and P2**. To get it to follow, I think we’d need to quantify over nonexistents, but that’s forbidden for this horn of the dilemma. The best I can do with P3 is to rephrase as
P3*. There are represented things without properties.
and symbolize:
P3**. ($x)(P)(x is represented & (P is a property -> x does not have P))
I think Unicorn-haters will deny P3**, and maybe they should. If you have P3**, you get C1 and C2 immediately, and P1 and P2 are inessential red herrings. P3** is dubious in itself, as it asserts the existence of things without any properties whatsoever. Why should I believe in such things? Some people might even claim that P3** is inconsistent, since all represented things have, at least, the property of being represented.
So I don’t think I’d accept the Unicorn if I didn’t quantify over non-existent things. So let’s try quantifying over them.
We run into difficulties immediately, with P1. How are we going to distinguish between what exists and what doesn’t? We need a predicate for existence, so that we can consistently say: There are things that do not exist. We committed ourselves to that when we said we’d quantify over things that don’t exist. So, we’ll have to symbolize P1 as something like:
P1++. (x)(P)(P is a property and x has P -> x exists)
As for P2, our quantification over nonexistents and use of a predicate for existence lets us write it in all its quantificational splendor:
P2++. ($x)($y)(x represents y & y does not exist)
from these, P3++ follows (unless I’ve made an elementary mistake):
P3++. ($x)($y)(x represents y & (P)(P is a property -> x does not have P))
We can also get, from P1++ and P2++, that there are things without any properties. And, Pete will say, of course there are! All the things that don’t exist are things without any properties.
I think P3++ will also deliver the goods so far as HOR and FOR theories of consciousness go. Given P3++ (which follows from P1++ and P2++), the fact that a state is represented is not enough to guarantee that the state has any properties at all, much less that it has the property of being conscious.
So, should I love the Unicorn if I quantify over what does not exist? Yes and no.
Yes: Given quantification over things that do not exist, the Unicorn does show that being represented is insufficient to confer the PROPERTY of being conscious on a state. BUT
No: This version of the Unicorn does not establish that a state’s being conscious doesn’t consist in its being represented. We have to be careful to distinguish between *having a property* and *satisfying a description*. Unicorn lovers have to admit that satisfying a description is insufficient for having a property. After all, the nonexistent things that account for P2++’s truth satisfy lots of descriptions — ‘y is represented’ and ‘y does not exist’ are just two examples. But, on pain of contradicting P1++, satisfying those descriptions does not imply having any properties.
If we remember that satsifying a description and having a property are two different things, we can deflate the Unicorn. It shows, at most, that consciousness is not a property of mental states if HOR or FOR is true. But that’s not the same as saying that things satisfy the description ‘y is a conscious state’ just in virtue of being represented in a certain way. Being represented in that way isn’t a property either.
A Unicorn-hating HOR/FOR theorist should say somthing like this: I hate the Unicorn. If it’s valid, then it shows only that consciousness isn’t a genuine property of a state. But I don’t care whether consciousness is a genuine property of a state. I care whether satisfying the description ‘y is represented in such-and-such way’ is sufficient for satisfying the description ‘y is conscious’. The Unicorn doesn’t touch that question at all.
September 27th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Chase,
You more than made up for your lateness with your character count (4,226) and comment quality. Thanks! For Brain Hammer readers with insufficient time to read Chase’s comment, allow me to provide the following synopsis:
CHASE SAYS PETE WINS
Seriously, thanks for the excellent comment. Hopefully I’ll have some time tomorrow to respond in kind. My current impulse is to suspect that you miss a serious contender for formalizing the Unicorn while quantifying over only existents. More later.
Cheers,
Pete
September 28th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
“…from these, P3++ follows (unless I’ve made an elementary mistake): ”
You made an elementary mistake
I think you want P3++ to read:
P2+++. ($x)($y)(P)(x represents y & (P is property–>y does not have P)).
So y is the non-existant here and x is the representation of y.
Now, as for HOR and FOR, I take it that Pete’s “consists in” means something like sufficiency (which I gleaned from his response to Eric). So let y be some non-existant mental state (ug, am I saying this?) and let x be some higher-order mental state that represents y (or, better put, that represents to the subject of x that the subject is in y). Supposedly x can do its representing even if y does not exist (to make the parallel with the unicorn argument). And so we can have x represent y without y thereby having any property P. This looks OK.
But, to reiterate Chases’s point:
The argument presumes that being represented is not, itself, a property. So why not do the same with “being conscious”? On this suggestion, being a “conscious state” is not, by itself, a property of some mental state, but rather a fancy locution for “being in a state that represents a state like… thus and so”. Or something like that. Properties are sparse, descriptions are not… some of what the HOR and FOR people are doing is analyzing the language and getting straight what it takes to fall under certain descriptions. Sounds fine, at it avoids the unicorn argument.
And to rephrase Eric’s:
Sufficiency claims are weird. True, being represented is not sufficient for conscious mental states. But I think a charitable read of the HOR and FOR folks is that they are providing an account of conscious mental states for just those cases where there actually is a mental state there to be conscious, and that mental state is represented *in the right way* by some further mental state.
Sure, if you take the claims at face value, it appears that being represented is not sufficient. Then again, at face value, the claims of HOR and FOR (as you’ve stated them) would suggest that one of my mental states would be conscious if someone wrote a book about them or made a documentary. Thats a pretty stuffed straw man. If you don’t intend for your arguments to target that too-strong reading of the H/FOR folks, why do you intend to target a reading whereby both existing and “non-existing” mental states are candidates for consciousness?
*sigh* I really wanted this argument to work.
*double sigh* I need to get back to my dissertation.
September 28th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Chase,
Here’s the longer response I promised.
I like what you did in working out the quantification-over-inexistents version (modulo, of course, the elementary error Brandon points out). Since quantifying over inexistents squicks me out in general and the premises become a lot less compelling I hadn’t given that line much thought. One thing worth pointing out about the moral you draw is: Most defenders of HOR and FOR will be really really (really) sad when they find out that consciousness and phenomenality turn out not to be properties. So many of them were working so hard for so long against epiphenomenalists and dualists to show how consciousness and phenomenality can be causally efficacious physical properties. If the news delivered by the Unicorn is that these property projects are doomed, then mark my words: tears will flow.
But as I’ve indicated, I’m not super enthusiastic about quantifying over inexistents (just representing them), so I’m eager to fill in some gaps on your formalization of the no-quantification-over-inexistents version. I like what you do with the first premise. But for reasons that will become obvious soon, I feel like writing out its contrapositive:
P1***. (x)(P)( x=/=x -> ~(P is a property and x has P))
I also like what you do with the second premise. But why not spell out, in the argument, what’s involved in being a vacuous representation? That would involve saying something like there exist representations such that there exists nothing that they are true of (which is pretty much what I was saying in my response to Tad). So…
P2***. ($x)(y)(Rx & (Txy -> y=/=y))
I’m sure it’s obvious by now why I was so stoked in the first place about applying contraposition to your P1**. It jumps out at us now that we can derive something that serves, without quantifying over inexistents, as a formalization of “representing something does not suffice to confer a property to that thing”. Some things I have in mind include:
P3***. ($x)(y)(P)(Rx & (Txy -> ~(P is a property and y has P)))
and the equivalent
P3***. ~((x)($y)($P)((Rx -> (Txy & (P is a property and y has P))))
I hope, at this point, it’s ok if I switch back to English. I hope too that none of my WFF’s get turned into emoticons by WordPress.
September 28th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Hey Pete,
You say,
“But why not spell out, in the argument, what’s involved in being a vacuous representation? That would involve saying something like there exist representations such that there exists nothing that they are true of (which is pretty much what I was saying in my response to Tad).”
but this does not get you ‘vacuous representations’ because if it is the case that the state simply misrepresents an existing state it will be true that ‘there exists nothing’ that it is true of but false that it is vacuous (this was basically my response to your response to Tad…)
September 28th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Hi Brandon,
Thanks for the remarks.
I’m not totally sure that making consciousness not a property would immunize a position from the Unicorn. But supposing for the moment that it would, see my recent response to Chase regarding the lead balloon that’s going to go over as with the typical members of the HOR and FOR crowd. Imagine, for instance, how freaked out people will be when phenomenal qualities turn out to not be qualities!
I think your argument that my argument is a straw man argument may itself be a straw man argument. So there!
But seriously, folks…I’m having a hard time seeing how you, Brandon, aren’t just trying the old “then let’s add existence” move I tried to deal with in my N5 and responses to other comments. So as not to beat a dead (horned) horse let me see if the following is a sufficiently different way of putting my point to restore your faith in my argument.
Representation isn’t a relation. The thing with relations is that you can only bear them to things that exist and you can’t to things that don’t. If you can sometimes represent things that don’t exist, then representation is never a relation. And if representation is never a relation, then being represented is never a property, relational or otherwise, even in cases when the thing represented exists. Regarding these last two sentences, compare them to this next one. If triangles can sometimes be not blue, then triangularity is never blueness, even in cases of blue triangles. I wouldn’t be stuffing a straw man if I refused to focus on only the blue triangles now, would I?
September 28th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
Richard,
Representations of inexistents are indistingusihable from misrepresentations of existents.
So, for example, “Santa Claus ate my cookies” is equally well described as a representation of an inexistent thing (for example, a representation of magical snacker) and a misrepresentation of an existent thing (for example, a representation of the universe as containing a magical snacker).
Given this indistinguishability, the kinds of representations you are talking about aren’t a problem I haven’t already dealt with.
September 28th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
I think you are missing the point…but oh well, you can lead a unicorn to water…
September 28th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
I agree with Pete that, surely, tears will flow if consciousness is not a property. And it may be that consciousness is not a property. Oh well…
But I don’t think I need to add existance as a property to dodge the unicorn (as you suggested in N5). But it is part of the story. Let me explain by way of doing some armchair folk psychology:
The H/FOR folks seem to be starting with a perfectly good question: what makes a mental state a conscious mental state? Given this question, they try to formulate reasonable (or at least reasonable enough sounding) theories that answer the question. (I don’t buy such theories, but then again, who am I to say anything?) But what the unicorn shows is that the question is really ambiguous between
Q1) Given that x is in some token mental state y, what are the conditions for y being a conscious (phenomenal) mental state? (The H/FOR answer: it is represented)
And
Q2) Given that there are mental state tokens of type Y, and that mental states of type Y are not necessarily conscious mental states, what else is needed for a token of type Y to be conscious?
If you read the main question as asking Q2, then yes, it looks like you would have to smuggle in existence as a property. But I think it is more plausible to read the main question as Q1. Q1 neither refers to existence or “smuggles it in” in the way Q2 does.
I think part of the problem may lie in that I disagree with what you say about representations. But that’s a whole ‘nuther can of worms.
On a cheerier note, re: eric’s P1:
P1. People who don’t exist can’t win elections.
Missouri elected Mel Carnahan as senator after Mel Carnahan died in a plane crash (beating, btw, a certain John Ashcroft who went on to become attorney general Ashcroft). If death means that someone ceases to exist, we have a perfectly good real-world example of someone not existing and yet winning an election!
September 28th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
I agree with Pete that, surely, tears will flow if consciousness is not a property. And it may be that consciousness is not a property. Oh well…
But I don’t think I need to add existance as a property to dodge the unicorn (as you suggested in N5). But it is part of the story. Let me explain by way of doing some armchair folk psychology:
The H/FOR folks seem to be starting with a perfectly good question: what makes a mental state a conscious mental state? Given this question, they try to formulate reasonable (or at least reasonable enough sounding) theories that answer the question. (I don’t buy such theories, but then again, who am I to say anything?) But what the unicorn shows is that the question is really ambiguous between
Q1) Given that x is in some token mental state y, what are the conditions for y being a conscious (phenomenal) mental state? (The H/FOR answer: it is represented)
And
Q2) Given that there are mental state tokens of type Y, and that mental states of type Y are not necessarily conscious mental states, what else is needed for a token of type Y to be conscious?
If you read the main question as asking Q2, then yes, it looks like you would have to smuggle in existence as a property. But I think it is more plausible to read the main question as Q1. Q1 neither refers to existence or “smuggles it in” in the way Q2 does.
I think part of the problem may lie in that I disagree with what you say about representations. But that’s a whole ‘nuther can of worms.
On a cheerier note, re: eric’s P1:
P1. People who don’t exist can’t win elections.
Missouri elected Mel Carnahan as senator after Mel Carnahan died in a plane crash (beating, btw, a certain John Ashcroft who went on to become attorney general Ashcroft). If death means that someone ceases to exist, we have a perfectly good real-world example of someone not existing and yet winning an election!
September 29th, 2006 at 2:04 am
Brandon,
I don’t see how the type/token thing helps at all. Imagine blue triangle guy offering the following:
Q1) Given that x is some token figure, what are the conditions for x being a triangular figure? (Blue triangle guy’s answer: it is blue)
Q2) Given that there are figures of type X, what is needed for tokens of type X to be trianglular? (Blue triangle guy’s answer: they need to be blue)
Switching from Q2 to Q1 doesn’t give blue triangle guy a question that he has a better answer for.
Re: Missouri. I thought people from the “show me” state would refuse to attribute properties to entities that don’t exist.
September 29th, 2006 at 7:20 am
Thanks for catching my elementary mistake, Brandon.
Now, Pete:
Your P2*** is equivalent to:
($x)(y)(Rx & ~Txy)
“There are representations that aren’t true of anything.”
and your P3*** amounts to the claim that there are representations that are true of only things without properties. (To wit, the representations that aren’t true of anything at all.) Notice now that P1 is doing no work, given your rendering of P2. In fact, if we insist that everything we quantify over exists (and who wouldn’t!), then not only does it turn out that nonexistent things have no properties, but it also turns out that nonexistent things have EVERY property. Including the property of being conscious, if it is one.
I guess that’s my new favorite reason for thinking you can’t run the unicorn without quantifying over nonexistents.
Here’s a bit more detail. The vacuous truth of “Whatever doesn’t exist doesn’t have properties” just messes everything up, since “Whatever doesn’t exist has every property” is equally vacuously true. So, we could reason that being represented DOES suffice for having properties after all. If x is true of y, then either y=y or y=/=y. If y=y, then y has properties (because whatever exists has properties). And if y=/=y, then y has properties (becuase, vacuously, whatever doesn’t exist has properties).
September 30th, 2006 at 9:32 am
Chase,
I’m not moved by the alleged problem. Is the argument thereby rendered invalid? If so, I’m not seeing it.
September 30th, 2006 at 11:44 am
I.
The Unicorn turns on the claim that being represented cannot confer properties on anything, because nonexistents can be represented without having any properties. You don’t want to quantify over nonexistents, so you say “nonexistents can be represented without having any properties” means “There are representations that aren’t true of anything.”
If that’s what P3 means, though, I don’t see how to get C1 or C2. Those say that there are represented states/properties that aren’t conscious. (Or do you want to reinterpret the claim that “Being represented does not suffice for a state/property to be conscious” as something other than “Not all represented states/properties are conscious states/properties”?)
The existence of representations that aren’t true of anything doesn’t entail the existence of represented states/properties that aren’t conscious. It doesn’t entail the existence of represented states/properties at all.
So, yes. If P3 says “There are representations that aren’t true of anything with properties,” then the Unicorn is invalid.
II.
(This is a second stab at the point of my most recent previous post.) The reasoning behind the Unicorn is that nonexistent things (a) can be represented but (b) don’t have properties. So long as we quantify over only existing things, it is equally (and also vacuously) true that nonexistent things (a) can’t be represented and (b) do have properties. This is because there aren’t any nonexisting things. When there aren’t any F’s, (x)(Fx -> _) is true no matter how you fill in the blank.
Such considerations stand behind this argument, the Red Bull:
RB1. Things that don’t exist have properties.
RB2. Things that exist have properties.
RB3. Whatever we represent either exists or does not exist.
Therefore,
RB4. Being represented is sufficient for having properties.
Without quantifying over things that don’t exist, you can’t accept P1 without accepting RB1. And that makes the Unicorn look suspicious.
But read on…
III.
RB1 is inessential to the Red Bull, and RB3 is tautologous. The conclusion follows directly from RB2, which says that whatever exists has properties. From this it FOLLOWS that whatever is represented has properties, and so being represented is sufficient for having properties. The reason is simple: Everything exists, and so everything has properties. Consequently, everything that is represented has properties.
Likewise, if you don’t quantify over nonexistents, P1 is inessential to the Unicorn. To get something that amounts to P3, you just need P2, which says there are representations that are true of nothing. Any such representation would make P3’s claim that there are representations true of only things without properties true. If I’m not hiding anything, then I’m hiding only drugs. And I’m hiding only cash. And I’m hiding only pixie dust. That’s how ‘only’ works in this context.
So, it’s time reiterate the problem about the Unicorn’s validity. To say that being represented does not suffice for a state to be conscious is to make an existential claim:
There are represented states that are not conscious states.
That existential claim doesn’t follow from what you say P3 means:
There are representations not made true by anything with properties.
So, if you’re going to run the Unicorn without quantifying over nonexistents, I think you’ll need to reformulate it.
September 30th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
Chase,
It took me a little while to get the Red Bull reference. So you’ve actually seen “The Last Unicorn”? My excuse is that I have a a four-year-old daughter.
I’ll have a serious reply to your comment after the beer’s worn off. Nighty night.
September 30th, 2006 at 6:02 pm
[…] One thing I’m especially curious about is whether appeal to notional states constitutes a satisfying response to my Unicorn argument. I see how appeal to notional states works against Vlahos’ and others’ empty HOT kinds of objections. But unlike their objections, built into mine is the premise that things that don’t exist don’t instantiate any properties. As I’ve said, unicorns fail to instantiate the property of being fast not because they are slow, but because they don’t exist. I gather that there’s a sense in which Rosenthal would disagree with that premise, and I gather this from the remark from the 2002 passage: “There is no problem about how a nonexistent state can have the monadic property of being conscious.” I guess I think there is a problem and I wonder why I shouldn’t. Immediately following that sentence Rosenthal writes: States do not in any case occur independently of something of which they are states. And the occurrence of a conscious state is the appearance one has that one is in that state; compare the way we speak about rainbows. This will seem problematic only if one regards the phenomenological appearances as automatically veridical. […]
October 1st, 2006 at 2:42 pm
So, Chase, I’m not sure we have a diagnosis that points a way to a cure yet, but one hunch I have is that a lot of trouble is being created by not fully resisting the twin temptations to treat representation relationally and quantify into representational contexts. Perhaps my “x is true of y” is guilty of the sort of thing I worry about. I think you are right to suggest that I “want to reinterpret the claim that “Being represented does not suffice for a state/property to be conscious†as something other than “Not all represented states/properties are conscious states/propertiesâ€.”
I would like to (and still figure that I can) spell out the premises of the Unicorn without assuming that saying of x that it “represents y” commits one to relating x to y. I think it commits one to nothing further than the existence of x and a y-representation, where the “y” in “y-representation” is non-referring. There ought to be some formulation of P3 (the crucial premise) along the lines of something analogous to
It’s not the case that if Pete says “Unicorns stink.” then unicorns stink.
Of course, it would have to generalize beyond Pete to include other persons, beyond “Unicorns stink” to include other utterances, and beyond utterances to include other representations.
In short, I don’t just want to avoid quantifying over inexistents, I want to avoid quantifying over representeds.
October 2nd, 2006 at 1:00 pm
Pete-
Here’s how (I think) John Heil (might) say what you are wanting to say with your Unicorn. maybe it’ll help.
Representation is an internal relation, and internal relations introduce no additions to Being. This isn’t nonsense. R is an internal relation whenever the mere existence of a and b is sufficient for aRb to hold, and the holding of aRb makes no difference to the relata.
Consider some representation (with a certain content) and some existing thing that it represents. Either could exist without the other. Moreover, either could exist without the other WHILE REMAINING EXACTLY THE SAME. Now, look at a world where the representation (with that content) exists and so does the thing is represents and, PRESTO!, the representation relation holds between them. But it’s not a genuine relation. It’s not an addition to Being.
So here’s what I’ll call Heil’s Hippogriff:
1. Representation is an internal relation.
2. So, things always have the same properties regardless of whether they are represented or not.
3. So, any state of a person has exactly the same properties whether it is represented or not.
4. So, if a state has the property of phenomenality, it has the property of phenomenality whether or not there is a representation of that state.
5. HOR/FOR imply that there are states that have the property of phenomenality in virtue of being represented, but that contradicts 4.
6. Therefore, HOR/FOR are false.
October 2nd, 2006 at 3:29 pm
Chase,
The allegedly Heil-ish Hippogriff somewhat appealing, though I personally am not real happy with the first premise (on account of not being real happy saying that representation is any kind of relation, internal or otherwise, between a representer and a represented).
I confess to having read very little Heil. Where might I look for a concise statement of his thoughts on representation?
October 4th, 2006 at 8:29 am
Don’t fear the first premise, Pete. To say that R is an internal relation is not to say that R is a relation and R is internal. It’s to say that R is a pseudo-relation whose obtaining amounts to nothing other than the existence of its relata.
So, I think you can accept premise 1 without supposing that the existence of unicorn-representations implies the existence of unicorns. Unicorn-representations don’t represent unicorns (there being no unicorns for them to represent), but they would if only there were some unicorns for them to represent.
Another way of putting the point of the previous paragraph: Being a unicorn representation is not a relation to unicorns, and it is not the same as representing unicorns. Unicorn representations and unicorns are independent existences, and for a unicorn representation to represent a unicorn is nothing more than for both of them to exist.
As for a concise statement of Heil’s thoughts on representation, I think I’d direct you to Chapter 18, “Intentionality,” in *From and Ontological Point of View*. But beware, I think he’s more interested in defending internalism there than anything else, and he doesn’t say explicitly that representation is an internal relation. My attribution is based on having heard him say that truth-making is an internal relation about seventy or eighty times this summer.
You might find that the nascent internalism of the view that representation is an internal relation is not to your liking. I wouldn’t blame you fo that at all.
October 5th, 2006 at 3:29 am
Chase,
Thanks for the reference. Thanks too for exploring this line.
I really have no problem with R beyond calling it ‘representation’ and related problems.
I don’t mind saying that there are relations between x and y that obtain between them solely in virtue of their existing, for example, “_is a proper part of the same mereological fusion as _ is” or “_is a member of the same set as _is”.
I do mind saying things like “unicorn representations don’t represent unicorns”
Suppose there exists both a unicorn, u, and a unicorn-rerpesentation, r.
I bet there are lots of relations that r bears to u in virtue of them both existing. Which one is the R relation?
I bet there are lots of relations r bears to things a, b, c, etc. other than u in virtue of merely existing. In virtue of what does r bear R to u but not a, b, c, etc?
October 8th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
I think the important point about internal relations is that they aren’t real relations at all. There’s no point counting them, because aRb is equivalent to ($x)($y)(a=x & b=y).
So, in answer to your question, I think I’d say this. r bears R to u but not a, b, c, etc. simply in virtue of the fact that u is not identical with a, b, c, etc.
Now, you don’t like saying ‘unicorn representations don’t represent unicorns’. I think I do like saying it, but I think our disagreement is verbal. I read it as saying that unicorn representations don’t refer to unicorns, and you (I’ll bet) read it as saying that unicorn representations dont’ *purport* to refer to unicorns.
I’ll be glad to adopt your lingo. To represent unicorns is to purport to refer to unicorns. The important point is that purporting to refer to unicorns is an intrinsic feature of a unicorn representation. So, if there were any unicorns, they would be referred to by unicorn-representations simply in virtue of the fact that (a) the unicorns exist while (b) there are representations with a certain intrinsic feature. That makes being referred to by a unicorn representation a Cambridge property.
And so we have the Moorean Mermaid:
1. Phenomenality is a genuine property, not a Cambridge property.
2. “Being represented” is a Cambridge property.
3. Therefore, phenomenality is not the same as being represented.
[I have no idea why I want associate Moore with the disparaging of Cambridge properties, but I was really aiming for fantastical alliteration more than anything else.]
October 11th, 2006 at 4:45 am
Chase,
I’m happy at this point to view our disagreement as verbal. There’s something that bothers me about this “purport to refer” stuff that I cannot articulate to my satisfaction. Here’s an unsatisfactory attempt:
As I said, that’s unsatisfactory, so I’m happy to drop it for now.
P.S. So, what are the origins of “Cambridge properties” and “Cambridge changes”? I have a dim recollection that these were born of disparaging remarks made by someone not at Cambridge.
April 2nd, 2007 at 4:08 am
[…] The gist of the Unicorn Argument against representational theories of consciousness is that while both higher-order and first-order representational theories (HORs and FORs) require the existence of such a property as being represented, there is no such property since we can mentally represent things that don’t exist and things that don’t exist don’t instantiate properties. […]
April 4th, 2007 at 1:55 am
[…] If you won’t be an Atlanta, there’s a draft here and a synopsis here. […]
April 23rd, 2007 at 7:54 am
[…] Over at the Philosophy of Brains blog, Richard Brown has a post called “Kripke, Consciousness, and the ‘Corn” in which he tries to defend Higher-Order Representational theories of consciousness against the Unicorn Argument, by wedding HOR to a Kripkean cauasal theory of reference. […]
April 23rd, 2007 at 9:51 am
[…] Brain Hammer: http://www.petemandik.com/blog/2006/09/18/everybody-hates-my-unicorn/ […]
June 4th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
[…] In case you think you’ve heard it (and hated it) all before, pause and appreciate this: you haven’t. There’s new stuff peppered throughout. See, for instance, the brand-spanking-new section 7. Enjoy! The conclusion of the Unicorn argument is incompatible with HOT and FOR. HOT and FOR derive much of their plausibility from Transitivity and Transparency, respectively. If the lesson of the Unicorn is something that we can live with, then perhaps we must either (1) learn to live without Transitivity and Transparency or (2) find a way of accepting Transitivity and Transparency while rejecting HOT and FOR. Option (1) is the best option. Option (2) is unwelcome because it is hard to see how Transitivity and Transparency don’t just lead relatively directly to HOT and FOR, respectively. Further, a direct case for (1) can be made, and it is the aim of this section to make it. Resistance to abandonment of Transitivity and Transparency may be due to the fact that both theses are prima facie plausible and arguably useful. However, I think that their plausibility can be explained away and their utility can be had by much more plausible substitutes. […]