such a deviant one that we have no good reason to rely upon the subject’s
memory-reports at stage (2) – see Dennett, 1988b. If we do not rely on the
person’s memory, then there is no reason why we should not insist that the
colour-feels shift with the shift in concepts and language which takes place
in (2). In which case there is no inversion.
Block (1990) replies with a case which does not involve confusion or
memory-loss –Inverted Earth. This is a case offunctionalandintentional
inversion, but where (arguably)feelremains the same. In which case the
same conclusion follows, that the latter must be distinct from the former.
(a) There is a place – either an inverted duplicate of Earth, or some sort of
restricted artiWcial environment, like a room – where the colours of
everything are inverted from normal. In this place, the sky is yellow,
bananas are blue, grass is red, blood is green, and so on. But the
language-use of the inhabitants is also inverted. So theysay, ‘The sky is
blue’, ‘Bananas are yellow’, and so on.
(b) A normal Earthling is kidnapped, rendered unconscious, has colour-
inverters inserted into his eyes (or optic nerve), and is transported to
Inverted Earth. When he wakes up he notices no diVerence – he sees
the sky as blue, bananas as yellow, and so on. And that is the way he
describes things –falsely, so far as his own colour-concepts are concer-
ned, because the sky isnotblue, it is yellow.
(c) After a long enough period on Inverted Earth, his concepts (and the
intentional contents of his colour-thoughts) shift into line with those
of his co-locutors, so that when he says, ‘The sky is blue’, he means
the same as the people in the speech-community to which he then
belongs (namely, that the sky is yellow); and he then says something
true.
By stage (c) we have someone who is functionally and intentionally inver-
ted from a normal person on Earth. But surely what his experiences arelike
for him have remained the same! So when he looks at a yellow sky and
thinks the true thought which he would express by saying, ‘The sky is blue’,
it is, subjectively for him, just as it was when he looked at a blue sky back
on Earth.
However, this Inverted Earth argument assumes that meaning and
concepts have to be individuatedwidely, in terms of the objects and
properties in the thinker’s environment (as also does the more traditional
intra-personal inversion argument). So it is because the person says ‘blue’
in the presence of yellow things, in a language community where all
speakers normally refer to yellow things as ‘blue’, that he meansyellowand
expresses the conceptyellowby ‘blue’.
But there are those who think that concepts and intentional contents can
244 Consciousness: theWnal frontier?