your perceptual state comes down to paying close attention to the quality
of the worldrepresented(while being aware of itasrepresented – this will
become important later). Of course, in cases of perceptual illusion or
hallucination there may actually be no real quality of the world represen-
ted, but only a representing. But still, plausibly, there is nothing to your
experience over and above the way it represents the world as being.
But what about bodily sensations, like itches, tickles, and pains? Are
these, too, purely representational states? If so,whatdo they represent? It
might seem that all there really is to a pain, is a particular sort ofnon-
representational quality, which is experienced as unwelcome. In which
case, if we are forced to recognise qualia for bodily experiences, it may be
simpler and more plausible to allow that outer perceptions possess qualia
as well. But in fact, the case for qualia is no stronger in connection with
pain than with colour (Tye, 1995). In both cases our experience represents
to us a particular perceptible property – in the one case, of an external
surface, in the other case, of a region of our own body. In the case of
colour-perception, my perceptual state delivers the content, ‘Thatsurface
hasthatquality.’ In the case of pain, my state grounds an exactly parallel
sort of content, namely ‘Thatregion of my body hasthatquality.’ In each
case thethat qualityexpresses a recognitional concept, where what is
recognised is not a quale, but rather a property which our perceptual state
represents as being instantiated in the place in question.
If the above is correct, then qualia can no more be vindicated by the
deliverances of introspection, than by the ‘what Mary didn’t know’
argument and the ‘inverted qualia’ argument (discussed and defeated in,
respectively, section 2.2 and sections 2.4–2.5 above).
3 Cognitivist theories
As we have seen, the arguments oVered in support of mysterianism are less
than convincing. The remainder of this chapter will now be devoted to
exploring the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of attempts to explain
phenomenal consciousness in cognitive terms. The main contrast which we
shall consider is between theories which oVer their accounts in terms of
Wrst-order representations (FORs) and those which make appeal to higher-
order representations (HORs) of some sort. But we can represent all the
various attempts to provide a reductive explanation of phenomenal con-
sciousness on a branching tree-structure, as inWgure 9.2 below.
TheWrst choice to be made (choice-point (1) inWgure 9.2), is whether to
attempt a reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness in physical
(presumably neurobiological) terms, or whether to seek an explanation
which is cognitive and/or functional. For example, Crick and Koch (1990)
Cognitivist theories 247