I’m grateful for comments made by members of David Rosenthal’s Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science seminar at the City University of New York Graduate Center in March 2010, especially David Rosenthal, Ned Block and Elisabeth Pacherie. I returned to this paper eleven years later so that I could present it at the San Raffaele School of Philosophy “Mind, Language, and the First-Person Perspective” conference in September 2021. Thanks to Sam Coleman and Max Minden Ribeiro among others for comments on that occasion, and to Alfredo Tomasetta for some written comments.
1There’s an old question:
Q1 What is the relation between mind and world?
2It’s a bad question in so far as it suggests any opposition between mind and world, because minds are wholly part of the world. The same goes for the question
Q2 What is the relation between mind and reality?
– for the same reason. It’s hardly an improvement to ask
Q3 What is the relation between mind and that part of reality (‘the world’) which is other than mind?
for if one takes this as one’s principal question one may find it hard to take adequate account of the respects in which mind, a part of reality, can and does relate to itself in ways that are in crucial respects exactly the same as the ways in which it relates to other parts of reality. I can think about my current anxiety just as I can think about India.
3A slightly better question, perhaps, is
Q4 What is the relation between a particular individual mind – i.e. an individual locus of conscious experience – and that vast part of reality (which includes other minds) which is other than that particular mind?
but similar doubts arise even when we narrow things down in this way (after having assumed that we can satisfactorily individuate ‘minds’). This is because there are fundamental respects in which individual minds relate to themselves, or parts of themselves, very much as they relate to parts of reality other than themselves. When we ask how an individual mind or locus of conscious experience m relates to ‘the world’, we’re often principally interested in how m relates to things in general, but things in general certainly include m itself. So too, when we’re interested in the relations minds enter into, we’re nearly always principally interested in representational relations, or intentional relations, or content relations. But there’s no good reason to exclude m itself from among the things with which it can enter into such relations.
4We can narrow things further and ask:
Q5 What is the relation between a particular mental occurrence, a particular episode of experience e1, and the vast part of reality which is other than e1?
- 1 Like many – from Aristotle to Brentano and on – I think that there’s a fundamental respect in whic (...)
5This is another small improvement, I think, if only because we may give unnecessary hostages to fortune if we start talking about minds (as in Q4) as if they were neatly individuable things. (I’m not saying we can give precise identity conditions for episodes of experience.) But the same sort of question arises about Q5 as about Q4. If one is principally interested in the general question of what sorts of relations with reality a particular experience e1 can enter into, whether it’s a conscious thought or a perception or a sensation or an emotion, why start out by excluding e1 itself from consideration? It may be said that an experience can’t be about itself, but this is not so. I can think this very thought is puzzling – a thought that I find to be true when I think it.1
6We can narrow things further still, and ask
Q6 What is the relation between an experience considered at a given moment – call the portion of experience so considered e* – and the vast part of reality which is other than e*? (By ‘moment’ I mean a very short period of time.)
7I think that it can be helpful – interesting and important – to ask this question in certain philosophical contexts, but the same question arises about Q6 as about Q5. If one’s principal interest is in the general question of what relations with reality a particular moment of experience e* can enter into, why exclude e* itself from consideration? Perhaps the better question is simply this:
Q7 What is the relation between e* and reality considered as a whole – the universe?
8There are two immediate answers. e* obviously stands in the part–whole relation to reality considered as a whole. It also stands in the relation or pseudo-relation of identity to the part of reality it is itself. But these answers aren’t very interesting. When philosophers ask about relations between particular experiences and reality in general they are as already remarked usually interested in intentional relations, representational relations, content relations. They want an answer to the question
- 2 ‘An experience about x’ sounds odd, but conscious thoughts, dreams, and so on are experiences, and (...)
Q8 What is it for an experience to represent something? What is it for it to be an experience of something? What is it for it to be about something?2
9In short
Q9 What is it, quite generally speaking, for an experience to have content? And what is it for it to have the particular content it does?
10In what follows I’m going to take Q9 to embrace all the questions that make up Q8.
11What sorts of mental content are there? There’s a familiar distinction between internal and external content. I want to try to adjust it. It’s certainly not satisfactory to take ‘external content’ in the way that many do – to cover all things that exist in what is conventionally known as ‘the external world’. Nor is it enough to add on things like numbers and concepts. I think there’s a natural way of understanding the notion of internal content according to which all the kinds of mental content that are usually divided into internal and external are most properly classified as external, while the term ‘internal content’ is reserved for phenomenological content considered as a concretely existing phenomenon.
12I’ll mark off this new notion of internal content by giving it a capital letter – ‘Internal content’ – and shortening this to ‘I-content’.
[1] The I-content of e1 is its phenomenological content considered as a concretely existing phenomenon
- 3 This kind of externality is central to what G. E. Moore was getting at in his 1903 paper ‘The Refu (...)
and therefore not considered as a potentially shareable or repeatable type of content. Absolutely everything else that can be legitimately counted as the content of e1 is external. I’ll give this new notion of external content a capital letter – ’External content’ – and shorten this to ‘E-content’. Two things can be said straight away. First, that all shareable content is E-content, second, that the E-content of any given experience can exist without that experience existing.3
13Objection. ‘You can do this if you want, but what’s the point? Your distinction is very different from the standard distinction, and philosophers are so used to the standard distinction that they will have difficulty understanding what you say.’
14Reply. I think, and am going to argue, that the current line between external and internal is superficial, and that its superficiality is preventing us from getting a suitably general account of what ultimately most concerns us in this debate.
15Suppose I arrive with a bucket and you ask me what it contains – what its content is. I tell you: potatoes. Relative to this specification of content, my bucket has the same content as many other buckets – shareable content. Now I show you the potatoes and say ‘these potatoes’ – which no other bucket contains. This is concretely existing content. Occurrent mental content is concretely existing content in the same sense. It is of course, and necessarily, content of a certain qualitative type, and is therefore potentially reduplicable, but that is no surprise. Every concretely existing entity is necessarily of some qualitative type, and hence potentially reduplicable.
16You’re right that the conception of internal mental content specified in [1] – I-content – is quite different from the conception of internal content that is standard in analytic philosophy, according to which internal content is essentially shareable. So what follows may not be of much interest to most analytic philosophers. But I think it’s worth a look.
- 4 For this useful word, see Albahari (2019, p. 7). I’m accepting for purposes of discussion an old d (...)
- 5 For discussion see Strawson (2011), where I introduce the notion of non-sense-feeling or ‘NSF’ phe (...)
17Let e1 be an ordinary, vivid, veridical human perceptual experience of a river flowing under a bridge. The first thing to say is that like any ordinary human perceptual experience (rather than a putative merely sensory experience), e1 is a richly cognisensory episode.4 It’s as much a matter of cognitive experience, or cognitive phenomenology, or most generally non-sense-feeling phenomenology, as it is of sense-feeling phenomenology.5 I like to think that almost all of us might be able to agree about this.
18What is e1’s I-content? It’s the totality of e1’s concretely occurrent, irreducibly cognisensory phenomenological content – the totality of e1’s concretely occurrent, irreducibly cognisensory phenomenological being. I’ll call it ‘c’. It’s a token of a certain extremely specific content-type C. c is everything about e1 in virtue of which e1 can be completely phenomenologically (contentfully) identical to a numerically distinct experience e2. But it is itself trivially (‘logically’) unshareable. One pea can’t be another qualitatively identical pea. So too c, the I-content of e1 can’t be the I-content of e2. I-content is an essentially private matter.
19I think this is exactly what one would have supposed ‘internal mental content’ to be on first encountering the term, if one hadn’t been exposed to the debate about internal and external content in recent analytic philosophy of mind.
- 6 We can take e1 to be s’s total experiential field at t, so that its content, c, includes all somat (...)
- 7 Santayana’s notion of essence varies over time (see Sprigge, 1995), and is very different from the (...)
20What is e1’s E-content? It’s not just the river and the bridge, with whatever other features of the surrounding environment are experientially apprehended. This is because C, the complex, cognisensorily rich content-type of which e1 is a token concrete instance, is also part of its external content.6 C is certainly not any sort of concretely existing entity of a sort that could be a concrete part of e1 (e1 is itself a wholly concrete entity). It is, if you like, a (repeatable) ‘universal’. It’s what Santayana calls an ‘essence’. It’s a phenomenological essence.7
21If you blink, when looking at the scene, and are transported, during your blink, to the exactly corresponding position on Perfect Twin Earth (where water is H2O), then your post-blink experience e2 not only has different E-content from pre-blink experience e1 (river and bridge). It also has different I-content; even when e1 and e2 are phenomenologically identical. If, more mundanely, you blink here on Earth, in such a way that your pre- and post-blink experiences are phenomenologically identical, your two experiences have the same E-content but different I-content.
22On this view, all traditional internal content (all ‘Twin-shareable content’) classifies as external – as E-content. It isn’t E-content because it’s a physical object out there in what is standardly called ‘the external world’, the world of tables and chairs. Nor is it E-content because it’s a concretely existing entity that is ontologically distinct from the concretely existing entity that is your current experience even though it’s not out there in ‘the external world’ as ordinarily understood (as when you think about your current pain). C, the shareable content of e1, is neither of these things. It’s external simply because it’s not part of the actual concrete stuff or being of e1; because it’s a type of experience, not a concrete instance or token of experience. The mere fact that traditional internal content is shareable is sufficient to show that it’s external, as remarked. However it’s best classified ontologically, C is not an inseparable part of e1. This is so even though it’s essential to e1’s being the experience it is, with the I-content (i.e. c) that it actually has, that it has precisely the traditional internal content (i.e. C) it has.
23I’ll vary the point by considering Moore’s 1903 example of an experience of blue. By ‘blue’ I mean, like Moore, blue conceived of in the ordinary way as a directly visually apprehensible qualitative character. I’ll mark this meaning/use with a capital letter: Blue, and consider a specific shade of it, Blue57. Certainly, then, Blue57 is not out there in the external world of tables and chairs (Science 101). It is for all that a matter of external content relative to my current Blue57 experience. How so? Because my Blue57 current experience is a concrete token instance of a type of experiential content whose existence doesn’t depend in any way on the existence of my experience or indeed anyone else’s experience. I believe this is why Moore thought that the example of the experience of Blue was sufficient to refute idealism. It refutes idealism even if Blue is concretely exemplifiable (able to exist in the universe) only in experience, i.e. only as a determinate mode of the general determinable experience; as is I believe the case.
24I think that the current philosophical discussion of mental content is way off course, and that the misdirection has come to be built in to reflex ways of taking certain key words. So I’m not optimistic about being understood. So I may as well declare my hand further (this may give you a sufficient reason to stop reading, whether because you’re dismayed, or relieved that you don’t have to take me seriously): I take it to be true as a matter of fact that Blue57 concretely exists when and only when certain experiential episodes occur, experiential episodes that have a certain experiential-qualitative character. It then exists as a (‘fully objective’) property of these episodes, in such a way that it’s perfectly acceptable – straightforwardly true – to say two things that we have been told we should never say on pain of preposterousness. The first is that the experiential episodes are themselves – quite literally – Blue57. The second is that the Blue57 exists – concretely exists – in the brain. It’s certainly not ‘out there’ in the world (Science 101 again). The neurophysiologist will obviously not have Blue57 experience when examining the relevant part of the brain of someone having Blue57 experience, but no one should expect that.
25The type Blue57 – the thing with respect to which your and my experience can be qualitatively identical – does not (of course) concretely exist at all. And it is in itself – Moore’s point again – something wholly non-mental. It’s wholly non-mental even though (again) Blue57 can only ever concretely exist in the universe as the (I-)content of something mental: a conscious experience.
- 8 See e.g. Strawson (1994, §6.6), Gertler (2007); also Loar (1987; 2003); also Schlick (1925).
- 9 Whatever ‘pure consciousness experience’ is, it can’t be entirely contentless and also experience.
- 10 I am in other words going to use it to mean what many mean by ‘consciousness’. Note that the plura (...)
- 11 I follow Lewis (1994, p. 293) in treating ‘materialism’ and ‘physicalism’ as synonymous, although (...)
26Philosophers freely attribute content to many things that invite classification under the heading mental phenomenon, including so-called dispositional mental states like beliefs and preferences. I believe one needs to be very careful about this, if only because there’s an important way of thinking about the mental according to which dispositional phenomena don’t qualify as contentful mental phenomena at all (only conscious occurrences do). I’m not going to consider this here, however.8 I’m simply going to continue to restrict attention to experiences, using the plural-accepting count noun ‘experience’ to cover all mental phenomena that are both occurrent and conscious and (therefore)9 phenomenologically contentful. I’ll use the plural-lacking mass term ‘experience’ as a general term for the phenomenological content or experiential-qualitative character or experiential ‘what-it’s-like’ of experiences.10 I’ll also assume that materialism or physicalism is true, i.e. that every concrete existent is wholly physical.11
27Question. How can one hope to get a satisfactory general account of mental content if one restricts attention to occurrent mental phenomena, and indeed to conscious occurrent mental phenomena?
28Five replies. First, it’s often a good idea to try to give an account of a limited class of instances of a phenomenon and then see if it generalizes to other instances.
29Second, and as remarked, there’s an important case to be made for the view that only conscious mental phenomena – experiences – can really or strictly speaking be said to have mental content.
- 12 There are well known difficulties with Searle’s (1992) proposed solution. I make a proposal about (...)
30The third reply develops the second: even if one allows that there are occurrent mental phenomena that can be rightly said to be genuinely mentally contentful in spite of the fact that they’re not conscious, there’s an extremely serious difficulty (a straightforwardly metaphysical difficulty) in the idea that non-conscious dispositional mental phenomena can literally be said to have mental content.12
31The fourth reply arises from taking the second and third seriously. It may be a mistake to assume in advance that the correct account of mental content will apply to both conscious and non-conscious mental phenomena in a unified fashion. This assumption may force one into a series of Procrustean manoeuvres whose Procrustean nature may remain invisible to one because one hasn’t sufficiently examined one’s commitment to the assumption. More generally, one shouldn’t assume in advance that one knows the extension of the class of things to which a notion has proper application. One may go wrong because one is wrong about that extension. This is one reason why it can be better to start with a class of cases one is certain about and then see if one’s proposal can be extended to other cases.
32The fifth and balancing reply is that in some cases, and on some conceptions of what mental content is, generalization from occurrent cases to non-occurrent cases is easy and evident.
- 13 All sensible versions of physicalism explicitly deny that physics can say everything there is to s (...)
- 14 It isn’t aware of the ‘filling-in’ phenomena, for example (see e.g. Pessoa & de Weerd, 2003), and (...)
- 15 James (1896, pp. 466-467). James most certainly doesn’t deny the existence of consciousness in his (...)
33Having restricted the discussion to experiences and assumed the truth of physicalism, I should say that I’m an outright realist about experience. I’m a real realist about experience. I say this because some self-styled physicalists who claim to be realists about experience are really no such thing. Real realists about experience don’t try to avoid the issue of experience in the way some self-styled physicalists do, by doubting or overtly or covertly denying or otherwise discounting the reality of the most certainly known general natural fact about reality: the fact of (conscious) experience. Real realists about experience hold exactly the same basic general view about the nature of pain, taste experience, colour experience, and so on, as almost all other human beings, and (rightly) see no tension between this view and outright physicalism.13 It’s true that common sense is dramatically wrong about experiences in various ways.14 It is for all that entirely correct in its fundamental realism about experience – about the experiential-qualitative or qualial character of experiences. “There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, – the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists”.15
- 16 I take sense-feeling content to include all interoceptive and exteroceptive sensation and feeling, (...)
- 17 See Montague (2015) for a decisive argument for this conclusion. It’s remarkable that many present (...)
34Having restricted attention to experiences, conscious occurrent mental phenomena, it’s important not to forget that conscious thoughts are experiential episodes. As such they necessarily have phenomenological content. In particular, they have cognitive-phenomenological content. They may also be said to have non-cognitive phenomenological content, i.e. sense-feeling content of some sort (they can certainly be intimately accompanied by sense-feeling content).16 But they can’t possibly qualify as conscious thoughts, rather than conscious something-elses, if they don’t have specifically cognitive-phenomenological content – where this, like all phenomenology, is wholly a matter of having a certain qualitative/experiential/phenomenological character.17
- 18 This is not to say that the causation is as it seems in such a case. It feels as if it is (a) the (...)
35I’ll take this point for granted here. To deny the existence of cognitive phenomenology – of specifically cognitive-phenomenological experiential content – is to hold that the total lifelong character of our lived experience – everything that life is to us experientially – consists entirely of bare or pure sensation of one kind or another. In this case it must be false (to take one example) to say that one’s anguish at Lucy’s death includes conscious comprehending believing entertaining of the proposition that she is dead. I think this is enough to refute the view that there’s no such thing as cognitive phenomenology. What is most striking and painful for ordinary (real) people in such unhappy cases is the way the conscious comprehending believing entertaining of the proposition strikes again and again. It occurs in experience.18
36Another way to put the point is to say that to deny the existence of cognitive phenomenology is to endorse a version of the ‘myth of the given’. It is in effect to commit oneself to the view that what is truly phenomenologically given, in human life, is merely sensory. It’s never anything like: a cow under a tree in a field.
- 19 I take ‘sensory’ in a wide sense to including all feeling, including all emotional feeling.
37In fact, of course, almost all if not all adult human experience is cognisensory, as already remarked; it’s both cognitive and sensory, undisentanglably so.19 The undisentanglability of the cognitive and the sense-feeling elements is of course wholly compatible with the fact that the distinction between them is entirely proper and theoretically indispensable in a viable general theory of perception. It’s a philosophical mistake to think that any empirical result could ever put this point in question.
38There is, then, cognitive-phenomenological content or cognitive-experiential content. It’s a wholly phenomenological matter, as its name declares, so it’s not at all the same thing as cognitive content. It’s important to be clear about the distinction between cognitive-experiential content and cognitive content – the distinction between (for example)
[2] the proposition that nobody could possibly have had different parents (cognitive content)
and
[3] the what it’s like of comprehendingly thinking or grasping that nobody could possibly have had different parents (cognitive-experiential content)
– if one is to get clear on the distinction between I-content and E-content. For [2] and [3] are obviously very different things. I’ll come back to this.
39What is mental content, i.e. (given the restriction adopted in §5) experiential content? I think that one very good answer is this:
[4] the content of an experience is what it is an experience of – everything that it’s an experience of.
40I take this to be equivalent to
- 20 See Montague (2009, p. 497; 2016); also Brentano (1874), at least in part (I don’t agree with his (...)
[5] the content of an experience is absolutely everything that is experienced in the having of the experience, everything that is experientially registered or given in any way.20
- 21 There’s an interesting line of thought that treats all the content of experience as just defined – (...)
41This obviously (trivially) includes all the experience’s phenomenological features, as well as anything else that can be said to be registered – a cow, for example, a tree, a field, π …. The phenomenological features are (necessarily, trivially) part of what is given in the having of the experience, and they are a large part of what will now principally concern me. Plainly the content of an experience – its being a hope or a fear, for example – is more than what the experience is about given the usual understanding of ‘aboutness’.21
- 22 On the fact that the myth is a myth see e.g. Locke (1689, 2.9.8), Strong (1923), Sellars (1932), S (...)
- 23 Much more can be said. Rejecting the myth doesn’t for example involve denying that colour consider (...)
42This being so, it’s probably worth saying (I feel it shouldn’t be necessary, but it may be advisable given the current philosophical climate) that reference to the experiential givenness of the experience’s phenomenological features is entirely compatible with the fact that ‘the myth of the given’ is a myth.22 On this point it’s enough to repeat something that has already been said – that the phenomenological given is cognisensory through and through. That already consigns the basic ‘myth of the given’ to the realm of myth.23
43I’ve redefined internal content as I-content. Some may say that I’m simply changing the subject. I think it’s worth seeing what happens. It can be difficult to follow what someone is saying when they start using a standard phrase with a non-standard meaning. I hope it helps that I’ve introduced ‘I-content’ to denote the content that I think can truly be said to be internal. Whether it helps or not, it allows me to go on using the traditional term ‘internal content’ in the traditional way – to denote phenomenological-content types that can be multiply instantiated or ‘tokened’ by different subjects (and that are on my view a matter of E-content). I’ll call the traditional scheme of distinction the Int/Ext scheme, and the new scheme the I/E scheme.
44One could simply say that the terms ‘internal’ and ‘external’ as standardly used in the Int/Ext scheme are clumsy terms (like ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’), but that it doesn’t matter because we know what we mean by them. That’s one option. I’m trying something else. (I started this paper when I couldn’t get clear about where to draw the line between internal and external content as traditionally conceived.)
- 24 The ‘in principle’ is heavy, given that traditional internal content, which is by definition share (...)
- 25 Here our thoughts have external content that is fully shared by our philosophical Twins: Twin-shar (...)
45Some have tried to draw the distinction by saying that external content is content whose nature can’t be specified independently of reference to the so-called external environment, while internal content is content whose nature can in principle be so specified.24 The trouble is that it’s not clear what counts as the external environment. It seems that it can’t just mean the concrete external environment, given that we think about things like (the concept of) justice or non-existence or the number 2, which are E-content when thought about.25 But the problem remains even when we put justice and 2 aside, and restrict attention to the concrete external environment. For then we face the question: external to what? External to
(a) the concrete reality of the experiencing subject considered as a whole organism?
46Obviously not: when I think about my hand, my hand is external content. External then to
(b) the concrete reality of the subject of experience considered specifically in its mental aspects, as a persisting entity that is something less than a whole organism, e.g. a brain or part of a brain?
47No: whenever anyone thinks about (b), (b) is external content. External then to
(c) the subject of experience’s experiences considered just as phenomenologically qualified episodes?
48No. When I think about the pain I experienced yesterday, it’s E-content. It is itself concrete phenomenological content, but it’s a part of reality that is wholly other than the concrete phenomenological content of my current experience (a thought-experience).
49Suppose that I think about my pain today, the pain, P, I’m experiencing right now. We can ask first how P classifies on the Int/Ext scheme (the traditional scheme). It is, intuitively, a paradigmatically internal episode, but it’s external content relative to my thought about it even on the Int/Ext scheme, just as it is relative to your thought about it. All concrete particulars are external content on the Int/Ext scheme, as already remarked; on that scheme internal content is always and only a matter of types of content.
50How does P classify on the current I/E scheme? It seems that it gets into the E-content of my current thought just as the Eiffel Tower does – in exactly the same way. It’s a concrete particular that is being thought about by me. Is it part of my ‘external environment’? Well, it’s something in reality that’s available to be thought about, to be taken up by my thought, and in that sense it’s ‘out there’. You can think about it too, right now, as you sympathize with me, although my Twins can’t.
51It may be said that my current experience is best thought of (or must be thought of) as a unified whole in such a way that both my current pain and my current thought about my current pain are part of it. In that case it seems we have to say that my pain is part of the I-content of my total current experience in occurring as it does, and also part of the E-content of my current experience in being thought about as it is being thought about. Is this a problem? Not at all. I-content becomes E-content every time anyone thinks about any actual experience, whether it’s their own or anyone else’s. On the unified-whole view of co-occurrent experience, my current pain is part of the E-content of my current overall experience, and also part of its I-content.
52The proposal, in sum, is this: in the case of any experience e, the best use of the term ‘internal content’ is to refer to
[6] the actual concrete being of all the actually occurring phenomenological goings on that the existence of e involves.
53This has been called ‘I-content’ to distinguish it from the traditional use of ‘internal content’, but I will now take back the terms ‘internal content’ and ‘external content’ for my own use, alongside ‘I-content’ and ‘E-content’. External content is
[7] absolutely everything else (everything other than [6]) that can correctly be said to be part of the content of e.
- 26 One certainly shouldn’t exclude the ‘attitudinal’ aspects of an experience – e.g. the fact that it (...)
54I want now to go through a series of cases that show the proposal in action without adding any new ideas.26
- 27 Some of this material appears in Strawson (2011).
55My sister and I are looking at or thinking about the River Cherwell, which I’ll call ‘r1’, flowing under the Humpback Bridge, which I’ll call ‘b1’, in the University Parks in Oxford. I’ll call my token experience e1, and I’ll call her token experience e2. I’ll put all names of mental contents in square brackets, whether they’re I-content or E-content.27
56e1, my experience of the river and the bridge, has a particular overall experiential-qualitative character. e2, my sister’s overall experience of river and bridge, is almost certainly phenomenologically different in some respects, even if we’re both just thinking about the bridge, and not actually looking at it (conscious thought is as much a matter of experience as conscious perception, as remarked in §7). I’m experiencing ‘Cherwell-River-flowing-under-Humpback-Bridge X-ishly’, my sister is experiencing ‘Cherwell-River-flowing-under-Humpback-Bridge Y-ishly’. More generally, and eliminating reference to particular rivers and bridges: she’s experiencing F-ish-river-flowing-under-G-ish-bridge in a Y-ish way, and I’m experiencing F-ish-river-flowing-under-G-ish-bridge in an X-ish way.
57Let me try to set this out more fully. I’ll use capital letters to indicate phenomenological content. I’ll put names of actual concrete occurrences (tokens) of phenomenological content in italic capitals to distinguish them from names of types of phenomenological content, which I’ll put in bold capitals, and I’ll number names of occurrences (tokens) of phenomenological content to indicate that they’re numerically distinct.
58We can then say that my experience e1 has token phenomenological content [RBX1]. It is (therefore) a token occurrence of phenomenological content of type [RBX]. My sister’s experience e2 has token phenomenological content [RBY1] and is (therefore) of phenomenological content type [RBY].
59Our experiences e1 and e2 are probably pretty similar in certain respects, phenomenological-contentwise. But they’re probably also different. This is pretty obvious if we’re both looking at the river and the bridge, and sensory phenomenological content is involved. It may seem a lot less obvious if only cognitive-experiential content is involved: if we’re both simply thinking of the river and the bridge, or both thinking that the River Cherwell flows under the Humpback Bridge. I’ll say something about this in due course.
60Our experiences are obviously identical in one respect, contentwise. They’re both of the River Cherwell and the Humpback Bridge, which is made of concrete and iron and is also sometimes known as the Rainbow Bridge. They have traditional E-content in common, which we can call [r1,b1]. But they’re different in respect of phenomenological-content type. Mine is of phenomenological content type [RBX], as remarked, and my sister’s is of phenomenological content type [RBY].
61We can diagram this as follows:
|
I
|
E
|
|
e1
|
[RBX1]
|
[r1,b1]
|
|
e2
|
[RBY1]
|
[r1,b1]
|
62Where should we put the phenomenological-content types in the diagram? Plainly they’re E-content, so we extend the E-content column as follows:
|
I
|
E
|
|
e1
|
[RBX1]
|
[r1,b1]
|
|
|
[RBX]
|
|
e2
|
[RBY1]
|
[r1,b1]
|
|
|
[RBY]
|
63All concretely existing phenomenological content, hence all actual I-content, is of course occurrent content. [RBX] and [RBY] are types of I-content, but they’re not themselves I-content. They can’t be, because they’re not occurrent, clockable concrete phenomenological goings-on. Relative to our actual, occurrent experiences, they’re E, ‘out there’.
64Someone might want to list them on the I side, thus,
|
I
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E
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e1
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[RBX1]
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[r1,b1]
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[RBX]
|
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|
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e2
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[RBY1]
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[r1,b1]
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[RBY]
|
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on the ground that they are indeed types of I-content. But anyone who feels even in the slightest bit ‘ontological’ about them should classify them as E-content.
65I don’t feel particularly ontological about them myself, but even so they can’t go on the I side, in the present scheme, because they’re not actual occurrent I-content at all. They’re E, ‘out there’, given my definition of I-content as occurrent phenomenological content.
66I’ll come back to this. First, though, consider one of my philosophical ‘Twins’, my newly born, hallucinating ‘Instant Twin’, say, as I have experience with I-content [RBX1] – which is of course experience of type [RBX]. My Instant Twin’s experience isn’t of any actual river or bridge, so there’s a blank in the E-content slot where I have r1 and b1. And obviously his experience isn’t numerically identical to mine. I have experience e1 and he has experience e3: the I-content of his experience isn’t numerically identical to mine, considered as the concrete occurrent phenomenon it is. I have an experience with I-content [RBX1] and he has an experience with I-content [RBX2]. But his experience is of course phenomenologically identical to mine: his and my experiences are both of type [RBX]. They have exactly the same content in that very clear and straightforward sense; his content may be said numerically identical to mine considered as a type of content ([RBX]).
|
I
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E
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|
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e1
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[RBX1]
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[r1,b1]
|
(me)
|
|
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[RBX]
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|
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e2
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[RBY1]
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[r1,b1]
|
(my sister)
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|
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[RBY]
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|
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e3
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[RBX2]
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[––––]
|
(my Instant Twin)
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|
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[RBX]
|
|
67What about my Twin on Perfect Twin Earth (PTE)? How does my PTE Twin’s experience, e4, classify contentwise relative to e1–e3, given that my Perfect Twin is looking at or thinking about a real river and a real bridge qualitatively identical to the River Cherwell and the Humpback Bridge here on earth, a river and a bridge which we may call [r2] and [b2] respectively? The answer is plain:
|
I
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E
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|
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e1
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[RBX1]
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[r1,b1]
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(me)
|
|
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[RBX]
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|
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e2
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[RBY1]
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[r1,b1]
|
(my sister)
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|
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[RBY]
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|
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e3
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[RBX2]
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[––––]
|
(my Instant Twin)
|
|
|
[RBX]
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|
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e4
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[RBX3]
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[r2,b2]
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(my PTE Twin)
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|
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[RBX]
|
|
68And now we may as well bring in my Classical Twin Earth Twin, and add a slot to the diagram to represent the fact that my sister and I and my PTE Twin are having experience of iron (Fe) and water (H2O). Call my Classical Twin Earth Twin’s river-bridge experience e5, and suppose that just as the stuff they call ‘water’ on Classical Twin Earth is xyz, so the stuff they call ‘iron’ on Classical Twin Earth is klm. The diagram is then as follows:
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I
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E
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|
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e1
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[RBX1]
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[r1,b1]
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(me)
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|
|
[Fe, H2O]
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|
|
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[RBX]
|
|
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e2
|
[RBY1]
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[r1,b1]
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(my sister)
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|
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[Fe, H2O]
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|
|
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[RBY]
|
|
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e3
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[RBX2]
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[––––]
|
(my Instant Twin)
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|
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[––––]
|
|
|
|
[RBX]
|
|
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e4
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[RBX3]
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[r2,b2]
|
(my PTE Twin)
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|
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[Fe, H2O]
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|
|
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[RBX]
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|
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e5
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[RBX4]
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[r3,b3]
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(my CTE Twin)
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|
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[klm, xyz]
|
|
|
|
[RBX]
|
|
- 28 All externalists take content to be something that can concretely exist, in so far as they take it (...)
69All this is routine, given my starting point: the definition of I-content as concretely occurring, clockable phenomenological content.28 Plainly nothing more is going to be added on the I-content side in this diagram, given the way I’ve defined I-content; whatever else is added on the E-content side.
- 29 I take it that my consciously thinking about the number 2 is a real, concrete, spatiotemporally lo (...)
70So far, perhaps, the I/E borderline is clear enough. On one side, there’s the I-content of the experience, the concretely occurring phenomenological content of the experience. On the other side, there’s everything else that the experience can correctly be said to be of, including numbers, phenomenological-content types, and so on.29
71‘C’est très joli’, you may say, ‘but you haven’t told me how you’re going to specify cognitive-phenomenological I-content in detail. How are you going to specify the respects in which your cognitive-phenomenological I-content is the same as your Twins’ and different from your sister’s?’
- 30 Strawson (2011). I think there are severe limits on what can be said about this matter, but that i (...)
72I address this issue in another paper.30 Here I’m going to put it aside, because I’m concerned with something else: difficulties with the distinction – the border – between I-content and E-content. I’m approaching the difficulty in a rather oblique way, and I hope the point of doing so will become clear.
73Back to the I/E border. In my scheme, it lies where I’ve made it lie by definition. The I-content of an experience is its occurrent phenomenological content. Its E-content is: every other sort of mental content it can correctly be said to have, including everything that has traditionally been called ‘internal content’: the kind of mental content that I fully share with my Twins.
74Plainly the I-content of one experience can be the E-content of another, as when I think about my pain, or yours. E-content picks up on ‘the world’, the surrounding environment, and my experiences (and yours) are part of the world, as are my amygdala and my pineal gland (and yours).
75Now suppose I consciously and understandingly think this very thought is puzzling. What happens to the I/E distinction? My thought-experience, call it e6, has cognitive-experiential content, like any conscious thought. It also has cognitive content, like any thought, and it seems natural to think that a thought-experience’s cognitive content is always E-content.
76But this appears to throw the standard internal/external content distinction into disarray. It also sounds problematic for the I/E distinction. For if a conscious thought can be about itself, then, given that its I-phenomenological content is at least part of what it itself is, it seems that its I-content is at least part of its E-content. (In saying ‘at least part of’ I’m taking e6 to be something more than its I-content, but one could cancel this supposition.) This doesn’t sound so good.
77How is it represented in a diagram of the sort I introduced earlier? If we call the cognitive-experiential content of my thought this very thought is puzzling [PUZZ/X1], we may diagram my situation with regard to mental content as follows:
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I
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E
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|
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e6
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[PUZZ/X1]
|
[this very thought = e6]
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(me)
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[[PUZZ/X1]]
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|
|
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[PUZZ/X]
|
|
- 31 There is redundancy in the list of E-contents, because the component denoted by ‘[[PUZZ/X1]]’ is l (...)
78Strikingly, the I-content [PUZZ/X1] features twice. It features both as actually occurring I-content and – qua object of thought – as E-content, cognitive content.31 Evidently it has to exist as actually occurring I-content in order to be available to be thought about in such a way as to be E-content.
79I’ve named the (cognitive-phenomenological) I-content of e6 ‘PUZZ/X1’, rather than just ‘PUZZ1’, because I want to allow for the possibility that my sister’s cognitive-phenomenological content-type is different, even if it’s also very similar, when she thinks this very thought is puzzling:
|
I
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E
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|
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e7
|
[PUZZ/Y1]
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[this very thought = e7]
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(my sister)
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[[PUZZ/Y1]]
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|
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[PUZZ/Y]
|
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80Let me add some more detail. When I think this very thought is puzzling I know what I’m thinking, and my thinking what I’m thinking involves the conscious deployment of the concepts thought and puzzlingness. These are therefore part of its E-content, as is the proposition this very thought is puzzling.
|
I
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E
|
|
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e6
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[PUZZ/X1]
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[this very thought = e6]
|
|
|
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[[PUZZ/X1]]
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(part of e6)
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[PUZZ/X]
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[puzzlingness]
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[thought]
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|
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[this very thought is puzzling]
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|
81My Instant Twin – who I take it can have thoughts (pace Davidson’s Swampman), and who isn’t debarred from thinking about puzzlingness by his instantaneity any more than he’s debarred from thinking about algebraic topology – diagrams like this:
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I
|
E
|
|
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e8
|
[PUZZ/X2]
|
[this very thought = e8]
|
(my Instant Twin)
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|
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[[PUZZ/X2]]
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|
|
|
[PUZZ/X]
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|
|
|
[puzzlingness]
|
|
|
|
[thought]
|
|
|
|
[this very thought is puzzling]
|
|
82The same goes for my Perfect Twin Earth (e9) and my Classical Twin Earth Twin (e10), mutatis mutandis.
83We don’t have to consider immediately self-referential thoughts like this very thought is puzzling to make the point. We can consider a thought about the universe, e.g. the concretely occurring thought everything is what it is (and not another thing), which is equally about itself, as well as everything else – since any thought about everything is about itself.
- 32 As before the point of the ‘X’ variable is to permit representation of the possibility that the co (...)
84Suppose I consciously think that everything is F. Let [EVERYTHING FX/1] represent the cognitive-experiential content of my conscious thinking that everything is F.32 Then e11 diagrams as follows:
- 33 Again there is redundancy in the specification of the E-content of e11 because [everything] is alr (...)
|
I
|
E
|
|
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e11
|
[EVERYTHING F/X1]
|
[everything]
|
|
|
|
[this very thought = e11]
|
(part of everything)
|
|
|
[[EVERYTHING F/X1]]
|
(part of e11 & of everything)
|
|
|
[EVERYTHING F/X]
|
|
|
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[F-ness, everythingness]
|
|
|
|
[everything is F]33
|
|
- 34 I obviously can’t think about things that don’t exist – they can’t possibly be part of the E-conte (...)
- 35 It may be said that a shadowy sense/feeling representation of pain is part of what it’s like to th (...)
85Am I bothered, in the words of the alarming British comedienne Catherine Tate? Am I bothered by this apparent complication? No. Once again, there’s no difficulty in the idea that I-content can be E-content. Everything that exists can be thought about in such a way as to be the E-content of a mental episode (in such a way as to be content according to any externalist conception of content), and I-content as defined (concretely occurring phenomenological content) is obviously one of the things that exist.34 I can think about your experience of pain now, or my experience of pain yesterday, or my experience of pain right now. In each case the I-content of my thought-experience, on the present account, is simply: what it’s like for me to have that thought, phenomenologically, and neither your pain now nor my pain yesterday nor my pain now is itself part of what it’s like to think that thought. So your pain now, and my pain yesterday and today is part of the E-content of my thought, whatever else it is or isn’t.35
86There does nevertheless seem to be a problem about how exactly we should put things, given that I-content can be E-content. One possible conclusion to draw is that the internal-external content distinction isn’t a very good one, either in my I/E version or in the standard Int/Ext version. External content, we used to say, is a matter of the subject’s environment. But we soon see that we have to add the subject itself to its environment, in so far as the subject itself is a concrete item that can feature in its own experience, and indeed in what we naturally classify as the external content of its experience. And now it seems that the subject’s subjective experience, another concrete item, has to be added to the subject’s environment, in what has now become a rather theoretical sense of ‘environment’, in so far as it too is something that can possibly feature in its experience, and so be part of what we seem to be required to classify as the external/E content of its experience. This is so whether it’s thinking about its present pain, or about its experience, yesterday, of remembering something that happened a year ago. And now it seems that even the occurrent phenomenological content of the subject’s present experience needs to be added to the subject’s ‘environment’ in cases where it features as part of the E-content of the experience of which it is the I-content (e.g. in this-very-thought-is-puzzling cases).
87We can perhaps improve things slightly, along the lines of questions Q5 and Q6 in §1, by moving from the notion of the subject’s environment to the notion of the experience’s environment, when seeking to characterize externality in terms of surrounding environment. But this won’t help when it comes to the fact that the experience itself – including of course its I-content – is part of the E-content of the experience, given that the experience is the thought that everything is F and that it is itself part of everything.
88But this is not to say that there is really no such thing as I-content. Even if I-content can be E-content, we can still characterize it in a way that distinguishes it from everything else that can be E-content. It may help to say this:
- 36 Some like to say that the Humpback Bridge can be immediately phenomenologically given. I don’t nee (...)
I-content, i.e. concretely occurring phenomenological content, is something that is by its nature immediately phenomenologically given, in a way that nothing can possibly be given when it’s given in the sense that it is the E-content of an experiential episode (a conscious thought, say). I-content is immediately phenomenologically given content considered just as immediately phenomenologically given! In this sense it’s not just immediately phenomenologically given content. It is, to repeat, immediately phenomenologically given content as immediately phenomenologically given.36
- 37 I’ll assume here that this is possible. It may be doubted on the ground that human experience is i (...)
89It seems that one has to say something like this because, again, one can think consciously about immediately phenomenologically given content. One can not only think about it in general terms (as you and I are doing now in thinking about it philosophically). It seems that one can also think about one’s own currently occurring immediately phenomenologically given content. Suppose one is in pain: one has currently occurring immediately phenomenologically given pain content – call it P. Suppose one is thinking about it as one has it.37 Call this thought T. P is of course part of the content of one’s conscious thought about it, simply because it’s what T is about. But P is part of the E-content of T (which has of course its own immediately given cognitive-experiential I-content). And although P is indeed, in itself, immediately phenomenologically given content, it is not part of the content of T considered just as immediately phenomenologically given content.
90I’ve put the point badly so that I can make the following objection. ‘Yes it is. It’s part of the content of T as it is in itself, and it is itself, as you say, currently occurring immediately phenomenologically given content. In becoming the object of T, it doesn’t change its nature.’
- 38 One can equally well, as a philosopher, think a thought about immediately phenomenologically given (...)
91True. The fact remains that the occurrence of T is not the occurrence of P, although the occurrence of P is part of the content of T. It’s in this sense that P is not part of the content of T as immediately phenomenologically given content.38
92This sounds rather ‘French’ (someone old-fashioned might say), but there’s nothing obscure about it. If it’s French, that just shows that we need the French, and that we sometimes need them to be very ‘French’. There is, again, no problem in the fact that I can think about your I-content, or my own, in such a way that it is then correctly said to be the E-content of the thought that I then have. This is because, when I think about it in this way, I’m not in so doing having it (I’m not having it in doing precisely and only this, sc. thinking about it). I’m not apprehending it – experiencing it or having it – immediately, or ‘from the inside’, in the way which is on the present terms (definitionally) constitutive of something’s being I-content.
- 39 I could replace ‘a physical thing like a chair is available to be thought about when it is percept (...)
93I submit that the I-content/E-content distinction is clear in spite of the complications introduced by experiences like thinking about everything. The difference between the way in which I-content is I-content and the way in which it can be E-content is no more mysterious than the difference between being in pain and thinking of being in pain. In fact the latter difference is a case of the former. Plainly being in pain and thinking of being in pain are different, because I can think of being in pain when I’m not in pain. I can also, of course, think about being in pain when I am in pain, and I can think about being in the very pain I am then in. In that case the pain features in my overall current experience both as I-content, simply in being had or felt, and also as E-content, in being thought about. And in that case it is available to be thought about – to be taken as E-content – in what is essentially exactly the same way as the way in which a physical thing like a chair is available to be thought about when it is perceptually present. It can, for example, be thought about demonstratively.39 You can think about it too; you may wonder what it’s like. Although it is a ‘private’ experience of mine, it is one of the things that exists in your environment, a few yards away from you, and you know it’s there.
94Let me briefly return to e6, the conscious thought this very thought is puzzling. The I-content of e6 is also part of the E-content of e6, but the I-content of e6 is not immediately phenomenologically given in so far as it’s given in being part of the E-content of e6. E-content can include I-content, as observed, but everything’s in order, because the following remains true and immutable: the phenomenon of an experience’s having E-content is never the phenomenon of an experience’s having I-content – even when part of its E-content is (as in the present case) its I-content.
- 40 In entertaining the E-content this very thought is puzzling one is in fact thinking about the neur (...)
95So to repeat: when I have a thought-experience that consists in thinking this very thought is puzzling, the I-content of the experience (sc its cognitive-phenomenological content, not its cognitive content) features twice in the full specification of its content, once as I-content and once as E-content. It features first as I-content because the thought-experience consists concretely in the cognitive experience of thinking this very thought is puzzling being immediately phenomenologically given. This phenomenon – the concretely occurring cognitive experience e6 of thinking this very thought is puzzling being immediately phenomenologically given – is then given again as E-content, because the experience is about itself considered as a whole, and is therefore a fortiori about one of its features, to wit, its I-content (phenomenological content). e6 is also, of course, about the brain processes that constitute or are it. It’s about the brain processes that constitute or are it even if their being is also in some way additional to the being of e6’s phenomenological content (which may be doubted); and even if one isn’t thinking about e6 considered specifically as it is characterized in neurophysiological terms. But we needn’t consider this sort of point now.40
96This description of what is going on may seem complicated, even horribly complicated, but I don’t think that it’s more complicated than the phenomenon it aims to describe. Things are rich. Thought is rich, experience is rich.
97I’ve argued that there’s a key sense in which you can’t stop E-content going all the way in. It can go everywhere. It can reach everything that exists, whatever your preferred ontology. Everything that exists can be E-content. But there’s also something it can’t do. Even when it’s gone all the way in, it can’t get at the all-the-way-in phenomenon ‘from the inside’ – as it were. I-content is (again) occurrent phenomenological content experienced from the inside, occurrent phenomenological content as immediately experienced; all other mental content is E-content.
98I’ve put it badly again. It seems at first that we can express the relevant point simply by saying that although I-content can be E-content, I-content as immediately experienced can’t be E-content. But although the idea may seem clear enough, expressed in this way, it’s possible to take the phrase ‘as immediately experienced’ in a way in which it’s not intended, and say that it is indeed and precisely occurrent phenomenological content as immediately experienced that can be E-content. Suppose I’m thinking about your conscious thinking. I’m taking your occurrent phenomenological content as the object of my thought, and there’s a clear sense in which I’m taking your occurrent phenomenological content just as it is, hence as it is immediately experienced (by you), as the object of my thought. The object of my thought is the occurrent phenomenological content of your thought as immediately experienced by you.
99I’ve suggested that we can deal with this by saying that the I-content of a given experience – say e12 – is the phenomenological content of that very experience e12 as immediately given in that very experience. This allows that the I-content of e12 can be part of the E-content of some other experience, say e13, and so allows – trivially – that the I-content of e12 as immediately experienced can be part of the E-content of some other experience e13. What the I-content of e12 can’t be, of course, is part of the I-content of some other experience.
100We face again the case of e6, the experience of consciously thinking that this very thought is puzzling, where part of the E-content of the experience is its own I-content. There’s nothing problematic about this, however. For
(i) the phenomenon of [PUZZ/X1]’s being the I-content of e6
consists in
(ii) [PUZZ/X1]’s being the phenomenological content immediately given in e6,
and
(iii) the phenomenon of [PUZZ/X1]’s being part of the E-content of e6
does not consist in (ii). This is so even though it is [PUZZ/X1] considered as a whole that is part of the E-content of e6 and although the existence of [PUZZ/X1] considered as a whole consists wholly in its being the phenomenological content immediately given in e6. Reality is complicated.
101A further – final – question arises. It seems that it’s not just highly recondite, cognitively complex experiences, like consciously thinking this very thought is puzzling, that are experiences of themselves. There appears to be a fundamental sense in which every experience, even the most primitive sensory experience, is of itself – whatever else it may or may not be of. There appears to be a fundamental sense in which all awareness comports awareness of that very awareness, i.e. awareness of itself, AOI for short – where by ‘comports’ I mean ‘carries along in itself’, ‘contains within itself’.
- 41 Ryle uses these terms (with disparaging intent) in The Concept of Mind (see e.g. pp. 158-159).
- 42 Arnauld (1683, p. 71); he uses ‘thought or perception’ to cover all conscious mental goings on.
- 43 Hume also very probably held this view; see e.g. Strawson (2013, p. 151fn.). Some deny that Descar (...)
- 44 I’m inclined to say that this necessity is a constitutive matter, but there appear to be certain d (...)
102This time-honoured view is sometimes expressed by talking of the ‘self-intimating’ or ‘phosphorescent’ character or ‘self-luminosity’ of experience.41 I’ll call it the ‘self-intimation thesis’ – ‘Self-Intimation’ for short. Arnauld puts it by saying that “thought or perception is essentially reflective on itself, or, as it is said more aptly in Latin, est sui conscia” i.e. is conscious of itself.42 Grove uses ‘thought’ in the same general way when he writes that ‘thought is an operation that involves in it a consciousness of itself’ (1718, p. 187). It’s endorsed by many other philosophers including Descartes, La Forge, Locke, Reid, almost all Phenomenologists (including Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger), Aristotle, and many Indian philosophers.43 In the version I (and I think most of its proponents) favour, self-intimation or AOI is held to be necessary for an experience’s having any experiential character at all, i.e. any I-content (as currently defined) at all.44 All agree that this immediate awareness of awareness is an essentially ‘same-order’ matter: it’s nothing to do with any sort of explicit reflective (introspective) inspection of one’s experiences, inspection that essentially involves a (higher-order) mental state taking another (lower-order) mental state as its object.
103Is Self-Intimation true? I think it is, but this is a question for another time (see e.g. Dreyfus 2011, Strawson 2015). My present aim is simply to argue that it’s compatible with the present account of the distinction between I and E mental content. This may be doubted, for, on the terms of the present account, Self-Intimation amounts to the claim that all I-content, all concretely occurring phenomenological content, necessarily comports experience of itself, and so presumably has itself as content. And if of-ness of content entails externality – E-ity – of content, then if Self-Intimation is true it appears that I-content exists essentially partly because it is part of its own E-content! This not only sounds extremely puzzling; it also directly challenges the present distinction between I- and E-content. For the distinction depends on the idea that E-content doesn’t and can’t go ‘all the way in’; and E-content now seems to be threatening to do precisely this.
- 45 See e.g. Zahavi (1999, p. 33).
104The difficulty – seeming difficulty – arises from the supposition that of-ness entails E-ity, and it is this that I would question. Some who endorse Self-Intimation allow that of-ness entails E-ity, but deny that AOI or self-intimation is really a matter of of-ness. Sartre expresses this idea by putting parentheses round the word ‘of’. He holds that the ‘of’ is grammatically required but metaphysically quite misleading. On this view, the claim that of-ness entails E-ity is correct, but the immediate sui generis reflexivity of experience isn’t really a matter of of-ness at all. More generally, proponents of this view argue that the self-intimation of experience is not only ‘pre-reflective’, ‘immediate’, ‘immanent’, ‘implicit’, ‘non-positional’, ‘non-objectifying’, but also ‘irrelational’: fundamentally metaphysically irrelational.45
105I think that this is one possible way to put things. I think it’s hard to avoid if one accepts that all experience involves AOI and allows that of-ness entails E-ity. But I see no reason to take ‘of’ in this way. I think it’s correct to say that all experience – all I-content – comports awareness of itself, in the full sense of ‘of’, and equally that it is (therefore) genuinely relational with respect to itself, and (therefore) genuinely intentional with respect to itself, and has itself as its own content. I don’t think this creates any pressure on us to say that it is part of its own E-content.
106Let ‘c’ stand as before for the I-content of an experience, as in §3. I distinguished earlier between
(a) c considered as immediately phenomenologically given ‘from the inside’ in the having of the experience
and
- 46 Either other experiences, or – in the case of conscious thoughts like this very thought is puzzlin (...)
(b) c considered as something that can be part of the E-content of experiences, along with bridges and rivers.46
107To consider c in way (a) is simply to consider it as it is in and of itself – to consider it in its essential being. To consider it in way (b) is to consider it as something that is, in the current sense of ‘immediately given’, not immediately given in the experience of whose E-content it is part, although what it is in and of itself – metaphysically or ontologically – is, as just remarked, something that is immediately phenomenologically given ‘from the inside’ in the having of experience.
108I hope this is clear enough: the (a) phenomenon can’t exist at all, in such a way that the (b)-phenomenon can possibly exist – where the (b)-phenomenon is the phenomenon of I-content being E-content – unless AOI or self-intimation is already in place, since AOI or self-intimation is a necessary condition of the existence of any phenomenological character or content at all. And although it’s perfectly acceptable to say that the I-content of the experience has itself as content – I think this is a powerful way of expressing the sui generis self-intimating nature of consciousness – the constitutive immediacy of this relation gives us no reason to say that it involves I-content being (part of) its own E-content. Consider e14, a two-second Red23-experience that occurs spontaneously in the brain with no external cause. (One can think of it as a hallucination, although it needn’t be thought to be anything other than a subjective red-experience that is not an experience of something in the external environment.) As I understand it, e14 diagrams as follows:
- 47 In the case of e15, an experience qualitatively identical to e14 caused in the normal way by light (...)
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I
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E
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e14
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[Red23]
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[––––]47
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[Red23]
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109It has no concrete E-content in being a kind of hallucination, and it is of course experience of type Red23, so [Red23] duly appears as part of its E-content.
110What about the fact that it’s looped on itself in the AOI way that is (i) necessary to the very existence of experience, and (ii) makes it correct to say that it is experience of itself? The present claim is simply that AOI doesn’t require us to place [Red23] in the E-content list of e14 (even though there are cases – e.g. e6 and e8 – in which an experience’s I-content does appear in its E-content list). Perhaps the simplest way to represent AOI in a diagram of this sort is to draw a looping arrow from [Red23] to [Red23] on the I-content side.
111On this view, then, we allow that use of the word ‘of’ is appropriate in the way that it clearly seems to be, when we try to characterize the AOI that is a necessary part of any phenomenology at all; but we deny that this of-ness entails E-ity.
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