Transparency of experience

The transparency of experience is the idea in the philosophy of mind that perception and other conscious experiences are phenomenally transparent. This means that experiences like perception present the properties of objects—like the redness of a tomato—but never the properties of experience itself. In this way, it is said that "we see right through" experience, making it difficult or even impossible for introspection to reveal its intrinsic properties. Philosophers debate whether experience is fully transparent or whether it is sometimes possible to access the properties of experience. Proposed counterexamples in which features of the experience are said to be directly accessible include itches, pains, emotions and moods. The transparency of experience is most commonly accepted for perceptual experiences, particularly visual perception, but proposed counterexamples also include visual experiences like blurred vision. Philosophers also debate what implications the transparency of experience has for the possibility of introspective knowledge. The transparency of experience has been interpreted in many ways. Most commonly, it is used to argue for the idea that mental experiences are fundamentally representational, a view called intentionalism or representationalism. This argument is sometimes extended to claim that there are no purely qualitative aspects of experience, or qualia, because all experiences have some representational content. The transparency thesis has also been used to argue for direct realism, disjunctivism, and various other views in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of perception. The transparency of experience has been traced back to modern philosophy in the writings of Thomas Reid, but it became more prominent in twentieth century philosophy due to famous passages in the works of G. E. Moore and Gilbert Harman.

Background Traditionally, philosophers have identified two separate aspects of experience: a representational aspect and a sensational aspect. The representational aspect, which is called intentionality, is an experience's ability to represent or to be directed towards things. The sensational aspect, also called the phenomenal character of the experience, is the way that the experience subjectively feels. The phenomenal character of experiences is also sometimes referred to as qualia. In a more narrow sense, qualia are specifically the nonrepresentational aspects of phenomenal experience, which are generally thought to be the intrinsic properties of experience. In the philosophy of mind, some theories attempt to explain what the mind is and what all mental states have in common. One of these theories is intentionalism or representationalism. This is the view that all mental states are intentional; that is, they all have some representational content. In general, intentionalism attempts to explain the phenomenal character of experience by saying that it comes from its representational content, and it denies the existence of intrinsic, nonrepresentational qualia. It can be contrasted with qualia theories that focus on the importance of nonrepresentational qualia to explain conscious experience.

Transparency

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.