Consciousness Live! with Victor Caston (S3 E26)

0:03 okay we are live um joining me today is a supremely special guest what a wonderful pleasure to have you here today um victor caston so uh victor i was wondering if you could say a little about who you are and what you do for those who might not know you sure i'd be happy to thanks thanks for having me on richard um uh so i'm a professor of philosophy and classical studies here at the university of michigan uh been for the past 15 years and most of my research is on ancient greek and roman philosophy in

0:36 particular the philosophy of mind and i've concentrated in particular on on aristotle and the stoics but i've i've ranged across the whole period so from pre-socratics and sophists all the way down to um late antiquity with with augustine and the kinds of topics i've been interested in uh also arrange a good deal my my my um sort of most um uh persistent interest has been in intentionality and content

1:10 uh mental representation but i've also written on mind-body issues on supervenience and emergent emergence and mental causation as well as uh a great deal in recent years on has been focused um more particularly on perception uh say for the past 10 years or so i've been focused uh extensively on that and questions about consciousness and qualia to the extent we can find um any kind of clues about about their

1:43 views about that higher order theories of consciousness um and so on oh yeah that's quite a bit that's a lot uh a lot of interesting stuff so for for people like me have an interest in the ancient philosophers and i think it's it's interesting in its own right but i wonder if you could what your thoughts are about how useful this might be to modern readers who may maybe are looking for um something that's useful to their own work so do you think that someone who's studying like modern philosophy cognitive science can benefit from uh thinking about the

2:17 ancients or do you think it's it's worthwhile absolutely i mean i think i think just like for philosophers um engaging with the history is is often very profitable um sometimes i mean sometimes it's a question about finding genuinely new ideas or ideas that have been neglected for a long time and so bringing them back uh and engaging with them can be really very profitable i mean so a very obvious example of this is the engagement with virtue ethics in antiquity was really was a stimulus i think to

2:51 contemporary discussions and critical discussions uh in other cases i mean i think i take a very empirical attitude towards this some sometimes you're going to find new interesting or neglected ideas um other times it's pretty strange we're pretty bizarre you just have to go and see what you can see um the uh i think that in general one of the benefits is that because it's from a different period and historical context

3:23 people have different preoccupations and different blind spots and so it's you get kind of a different angle uh even when you're dealing with the same problem because there are different assumptions that are involved there are different things that get questions slightly different approaches so um there's a very nice quotation from thomas huxley who um who argued about whether animals are automata and things like this in the 19th century about how the the history of the discipline gives

3:58 us a kind of parallax uh view of concepts because we get um these different angles on on a single subject and so see it in a fresh way and i think that it's it's been useful for expanding our our horizons in that way i mean just a small example um is that if you're looking at plato and aerosmile for example the the focus on propositional attitudes is not as as prominent as it is and say the hellenistic period and for good historical reasons i think

4:31 that you know 20th and 21st century philosophy is very influenced by the early modern period the early modern period is actually very influenced by hellenistic discussions like the stoics and the skeptics and the way they were um they were sort of rediscovered or appreciated in in the renaissance and afterwards the rise of early modern science but if you look at plato and aristotle they're not focused on propositional attitudes for a long time that was that was kind of um i don't know about embarrassment but it was an oddity about

5:04 dealing with their discussions of the mind on the other hand they were focused on non-propositional attitudes uh right pretty intently and that's been i think that's been an important rediscovery for contemporary philosophers to think about the different kinds of objects uh of different sorts of attitudes and to be a little bit more open in that way and and there would be other there would be other sorts of views as well i mean i mean at the same time there are all sorts of things they're not concerned with so it's very hard i've found to find discussions of qualia

5:39 of the quali phenomenal qualities of experience and that's an interesting thing in its own right maybe somewhat frustrating but but but sort of worthy of attention um uh there are there are other cases where things haven't been appreciated but coming at it from contemporary philosophy shines light where you didn't see it before yeah so i think yeah no i'm going to say i i completely agree with you i mean as for myself you know when i was in grad when i first

6:13 started i was like i don't want to read anything that was written before 1980 i want to know about the brain and cognitive science but then i realized how naive that was i had some great teachers obviously i mentioned one before we started john glenville and a couple of others but who really opened my eyes to the usefulness and importance of going back and reading with modern eyes but also trying to understand them from the things they were worried about but also trying to to cut to engage in that discussion with them um and to continue that discussion which they start absolutely absolutely yeah so

6:46 i think that i think that if you look at many of the great figures in anglophone philosophy um did have that kind of engagement and did did take those those discussions that they were having with the ancients as a as a real stimulus i mean uh you you can easily mention people like gilbert ryle and jl austin and bernard williams um and and it goes on from there so yeah absolutely and that's something

7:18 that maybe is a bit lost um or under emphasized in our modern uh philosophical culture because there's so much emphasis on specialization and compartmentalization and i think maybe kind of the post-positivism hangover that we have where there is this emphasis on small questions um and not as not as much emphasis on the big questions and these uh overarching dialogues that we may have especially i mean specialization has been an issue i think that um uh there were other uh there was other kinds of um hostility to history of philosophy in the past i think certainly uh

7:53 during our graduate training and all um you know for me i remember my memory of the 80s and the 90s was that you know there was a real division uh and people really thought that that you know history was really something separate um from philosophy but and there were there were historians who also thought of themselves as doing something distinct but i think i think actually i've been very encouraged by the last 10 to 15 years because i think that people have broader interests now and are a little bit more open

8:24 to discussions across boundaries and yeah um and so it's been i found it much more stimulating yeah i agree yeah i think i think there's been a change i i mean not just as an anecdote i remember in grad school i came to a class on philosophy of i mentioned aristotle and the teacher was very like taken aback and was like oh you you're into aristotle like uh it's like yeah because there's an attitude like philosophy starts with fraga basically and then we'll move on from there but it's nice to see that's kind of proceeding i think um i think so so i wanted to ask about just generally

8:58 speaking because you mentioned you know phenomenal consciousness qualia things qualia things of that nature uh do you think that the ancient greeks in particular had a notion of consciousness that connects up with ours because some people argue that we didn't really start having this modern notion until after descartes at least um the idea of a conscious mental state is that something that you do find in in the ancients absolutely i mean it's hard to imagine how you could not have it um but i think what's interesting is the ways in which it it's manifest

9:32 in the text so there's certain things that they're they're quite explicit about and there are other things that you might you might get hints of it but but it's not as as as central um and i think that we have we have this kind of uh fixation with descartes is this pivotal moment um which i think is really i mean it's understandable why we do that but but i think it's quite mistaken and misleading i think there are many many aspects many interests in the philosophy of mind that do go back earlier and it's different for different periods and

10:06 it's just worth approaching it with an open mind so about consciousness um i think that until quite recently uh people who are reading the ancient texts uh just projected their own way of thinking about things onto it so they just assumed that the ancients were talking about phenomenal awareness that they were talking for example about images or about sense data or things like that and then people became very skeptical of that and just kind of pulled back

10:39 uh there are discussions about these various things um but i guess what i would say is this is that there's a much clearer emphasis throughout on um the intentionality of perception so on its content what it is that you're aware of where that would be things in the in the outside world for the most part um and uh and also on higher order consciousness so um our being aware or perceiving that we

11:13 perceive that we see that we hear awareness that we're thinking and things like that and so there are very throughout the whole the whole period there are discussions of that so that's that that i think is a very clear emphasis what's much harder to find is a fixation on qualia as i said i think that's in a way the most elusive subject i mean it it may have been a concern but it's not um something that gets articulated

11:45 clearly and the problems that we associate with with qualia for example about uh um reduction or mind-body issues similarly are absent there are other ones that we identify with descartes for example um where there actually is some earlier history so just to take two if you think about what descartes really introduces especially through the meditations to early modern philosophy in terms of subjectivity

12:18 or privacy in particular i think many historians of ancient greek philosophy think that really is a modern concern it's not to be found in antiquity and i and i think that that's clearly i mean it's demonstrably false so you can find um elements on on both uh both those sorts of issues certainly in augustine and in platinus and you can find i think many discussions of of these issues uh

12:52 earlier among skeptics like that the pureness skeptics like sextus empiricus right and and depending on what you have in mind with privacy i think those issues actually can be found in classical antiquity so in the fifth and in the fourth century so there are worries about privacy and about subjectivity in already in the sophists um protagoras right and gorgeous and um and then the reactions to them in in plato for example in an aristotle um

13:26 and you can also throw in democrats there as well it's it's a little bit harder to get to extract much but i think that i think it's easily argued that they they are touching on those issues yeah that's interesting i mean that there's so much of what we take to be distinctively modern worries or philosophical puzzles or problems you can find elements of those even in these early thinkers um you certainly can i think there are differences in what what preoccupies us like what we take to be

13:58 pivotal you know and all of our discussions kind of center around it those those will be those will be different and i think that they're as i said their interest 10 tends more towards issues about content um right this is i've i focus on it and for me that's that's actually been a really useful set of questions with with which to approach the ancient texts because uh a lot of preoccupations of of of historians or other people who are writing on these ancient figures um brought their own preoccupations to

14:34 the table and so a lot of them had to do with mind-body issues right and so even when they were talking about perception or about thinking they were focused on these more metaphysical questions than just questions about how does the mind work and how are they thinking of the mind and how does it how do mental states have the content that they do right right and that's you find i mean so it's clear like when you're reading aristotle for example that he's very interested in in that set of topics um but even going back to plato and like i think as you point out parmenides as well can be read in this way um but it's

15:07 not so much clear that they they worry about like the question of what makes a mental state conscious or whether so do do they even think in in that way in terms of mental states or being conscious or not um would you say that's a distinctively modern thing uh no i don't think so at all i mean as i said i mean if you think if you think that um the the core issues about consciousness are about the hard problem and about about uh explaining what it's like to have sorts of

15:40 experiences or what sorts of qualities of our experiences are immediately evident to us or accessible to us um as i said i think you find only kind of hints and um you don't you certainly don't have this kind of central fixation with that that set of issues that locus of problems but but if you are interested instead with say higher order theories and questions about

16:12 what makes a given mental state a conscious state right and you're thinking in terms of as higher order theorists do anybody from david rosenthal to to fransprintano right where you think well what makes it conscious is that there's another mental state which is directed at it right so we're aware of it because we're either perceiving it or thinking about it or making a judgment however you you view it they absolutely talk about that and the

16:46 argument that aristotle gives for example in his on the soul or i'm sure i'll slip into using its latin title the de anima um the infamous 3-2 the infamous three two right in book three chapter two the very beginning of that is a set of arguments about how it is that we perceive that we see in here and one of the arguments is a regress argument in order to show that there must be an awareness of

17:19 perceiving in the very first step at the very first step either depending on your reading in the very act itself it must be aware of itself right um or that somehow there's a capacity which is aware aware of it and that's the same argument that franz brentano uses sort of the beginning of modern contemporary philosophy of mind um in his psychology from an empirical standpoint is just a commentary on on aristotle there right and

17:52 of course the assumptions are different i mean um aristotle thinks that every mental state um is aware reflexively aware in this way um whereas i think that most of us are inclined to think no you might have some mental states of which you're not aware right and so i mean you know that's a there's that's an another good example of something where you don't find it until later but it is present in antiquity that namely

18:28 unconscious mental states contentful having intentionality of their own may be involved in behavior in various ways but of which the personal agent is not aware so you say you do find that in antiquity you absolutely do i mean you certainly find it in say someone like platinus so there there are mental states of which the individual is not aware um but you find questions about it or worries about it

19:01 from earlier on i mean so i think that indirectly somebody like aristotle is is concerned that even if he rejects it it's it's on the horizon it's in the horizon of possibilities interesting yeah because i was thinking that the sort of distinctively modern question might be or contemporary question anyway it might be um what distinguishes the unconscious mental stage from the conscious ones and higher order theories are typically aimed at trying to answer that question right it didn't seem to me like aristotle really had that i mean as you say in your paper on this he kind of

19:34 just takes it as a basic datum about consciousness that we always are aware of our perceptions or perceive our own perceptions he doesn't really argue for that right that's a kind of a bedrock foundational thing that's right he doesn't argue for it although he does um he does argue against the opposing view so i mean he does say right you can't be unaware um that that that's an incoherent kind of thought i mean they're not extensive arguments but it comes up a number of times that he thinks you have you have to be aware about

20:06 yeah what what is the argument against the uh against uh having a perception that we're unaware of um so he doesn't argue ex he doesn't argue um he doesn't offer an argument directly against that but it but it comes up a couple of times in his treatise on comes up twice in his treatise on uh perceiving uh the de sensu um and uh he rejects it as i mean he focuses on it explicitly as a position to be rejected it's not that he offers reasons

20:40 against it i mean i think i think there is that kind of gap is he just doesn't take seriously um or doesn't worry about about this as a possibility i think okay and i think yeah i think i think that one i mean it's we can only speculate i think at that point but i think that one thing is that he must take it to be um a necessary and indeed essential feature of what he calls perceiving i stand as thy that one has awareness

21:15 and his way of explaining it is in terms of this higher order um uh directedness and what's what's interesting about his position is he doesn't take there to be it to be due to other mental states focused on it the way you might if you were introspecting or reflecting but that he takes there to be a kind of reflexive self-directedness of each mental act and he's not troubled by that brentano was the same way he thought that right

21:47 that every mental act was directed at itself not primarily but secondarily on the side was the expression right so i i am curious about that because i mean there are there are some people who still try to take this kind of line like there's uriah kriegel um and maybe to a lesser extent but yeah in the same camp i say rocco gennaro um yeah but uh i don't think either of those guys are really really trying to say what aristotle's trying to say because what they so for rocco especially it's like the higher order content is aimed at the

22:20 lower order content right so you still have this distinction there but i don't think that's what aristotle's saying basically so so how does he in view this self-representation yeah not as i've interpreted it i i i mean um my memory of rocco's work is that he says look we we still have to draw a distinction i'm good with that there has to be a distinction between the lower order content and the higher order content and these are two distinct types of mental state right but but he but i argue that that airsoft that aristotle's argument commits him to

22:53 the view that it must be the same uh token event that instantiates both types and so that it really is self-directed and from what i remember rocco is more inclined to say look there must be two distinct parts right and one part instantiates one type and the other part instantiates the other type and the higher order type is directed at the lower order type uriah um uh who i taught actually years years and years ago um

23:26 it definitely goes off in other directions i haven't kept up with the most recent stuff so i can't um i can't comment on that but um uh yeah i don't think he's inclined to to take it that way i should say that uh that that my reading of dianama 3 2 is something of an outlier i think that um i was uh i went back and said look this is what front sprint this is how franz brentana read it and he and i mean he just took it for granted and he just said this is obviously what

23:58 what are some was thinking and i and i thought actually this is a completely defensible reading and so i developed an argument to show this is actually the best way of understanding how the arguments work but but many people read it instead um in a in a fairly different way where it's really not about uh mental acts or mental events but it's about mental capacities and they think that it are it um it gives a reason for committing aerosol to a kind of internal monitoring

24:30 theory so like some kind of inner sense which is directed at it and um and i think it's a very it's a very different reading of um of aristotle but is that the strong what you call the strong capacities reading well i think nobody holds the strong capacity okay so so i think that i mean just to give the the in skeletal form the the structure of the argument is this passage in at the beginning of chapter two of book three um depends heavily on the word

25:05 um ice thesis and which and and and then um instances of it like opsis which is for vision and in aristotle these are flagged as systematically ambiguous between a capacity for perception or for sight or for vision and the activity that that capacity exercises so perceiving um seeing and most everyone reads it in terms of the capacity view and so translations that

25:38 you'll find to us the common translations you'll find revert to capacity readings throughout and if you were really strict about it and that would give you the strong capacity reading it would give you a position that nobody's actually defended and i think is not really at all attractive i mean it it may occupy a position in logical space but it's not nobody really it's not a live serious live option i say okay um and i said that's kind of that's kind of an interesting problem because if you look

26:13 at it in terms of activities and you translate the passage quite differently and that's how brintano understood it you get a very coherent reading you get a very powerful argument and one which has this immediate implication about the consciousness of individual acts of perceiving that they're they involve an awareness of themselves and because it's both higher order so it can be explained in terms of intentionality and because it's reflexive that is in the sense that it's

26:45 self-directed it captures both the intuitions of kind of intrinsic theories of consciousness which see consciousness is kind of luminous you know feature of each individual act and higher order theories which say that's just that's you know this intrinsic theory is mysterious higher order theory gives you intentionality content structure we can analyze it we know how to approach it and so this view says you get you get both of those because the higher order state is directed itself you can't get that on a capacity reading most people who read this

27:21 the large majority of people who read this passage um try a hybrid reading without really paying attention what they're doing and so they read it as being about capacities in many of the occurrences of these words and then they understand it in terms of activities right so they say well there must be a regressive capacities that has to be stopped there has to be some capacity which is aware of the initial capacity say a vision repairing but what it's aware of are the acts

27:57 of that initial capacity and so that's what i call the moderate capacity reading and it's all it's an old view so if you go back to i think one of the greatest aristotelian commentators alexander vapherdisius he's he's um second to third century before the common era and he's right up there alongside of veraweez and thomas aquinas um and he's in many ways much closer to contemporary aristotelian readings than than anybody else he has a moderate capacity reading too

28:30 he's he he just mixes mixes the two ideas together in this way another person who does this recently who who's very critical of my work is um thomas johansson who has a defense of inner sense uh reading of aristotle um so so part of your argument against the moderate capacity reading that is it doesn't make sense of the context and some of the other discussions that aristotle is having that you can find um and i guess also a part of it is that there's his background of something to

29:03 do that was talked about in plato that it wouldn't it wouldn't read what well against the uh the kind of platonic background or the thing he's reacting to yeah i think that i think that um the issue here is that it um it doesn't actually fit the language in the text and so if you it the the more closely you scrutinize the text um the harder it is to maintain this view so i mean it has it's kind of like soft uh worn flannel it feels very comfortable it seems very intuitive

29:37 right and so people think oh that must be what he's talking about and um it's just kind of hand wavy when you get to the text because if you say well but look at this sentence and look at this phrase and it the whole passage ends where it says and it is aware of itself in the greek and the only way to construe that construction is aware of itself is reflexively whereas on this kind of common reading what you get is a capacity is aware of

30:12 its activity and and so it just doesn't make sense of the greek and that's the same is true about plato and the carmodies so plato and the carmodies is he's interested there in a kind of knowledge that would be directed at itself and he's worried about all sorts of puzzles that arise and in one of these passages he just goes through a string of different cases belief of beliefs fear of fears love of loves so on like this and and and once again i think that if you look closely at the text

30:45 uh grammatically just grammatically um the the the most coherent way of construing the phrasing the way he's formulated it is in terms of these acts rather than capacities um that if you just spelled out what the alternative reading would be it it's it's not it's not a live option and so it's a so i mean it's it's funny for me to be saying this because i think you know a complaint that people might raise is how is he finding all these contemporary issues in these ancient

31:18 texts that sounds really anachronistic it's projection it's not rooted in the text and you know my point is if you actually look at the at the wording in the text right it fits with certain views and not with others and and and that's the basis for it yeah i mean i i thought that i found your reading to be pretty natural actually um the on the uh the uh that it's a self-reflective awareness one thing that i was wondering about was what the content of the

31:50 self-reflexive part was especially from like if you factor in that it's a perception and that you have a particular reading of aristotle's theory of perception um so so i wonder like what can we say about the actual content uh is it like i am seeing the azure sky or is it something that you i mean is it non-conceptual obviously like what's going on at that at that part right um so that's a very interesting question i think that um uh

32:23 at this point you mean you know there's there's only so much that the techs are explicit about and it's really much more question of tracing out the implications and seeing which ones are consistent and which ones make the most coherent sense of what we've got there in the broader context of his views um i think it is a really interesting question because depending on how you specify the higher order content of those states he might be vulnerable to various

32:56 regress arguments that he doesn't consider but they really could and so a good example of this sorry good discussion of this is at the very end it's a long paper but there's an appendix um sorry it's not in the appendix it's in one of the final sections is has objections and replies yeah the regressive content yeah and um i think that it's easy to raise this sort of worry about um if every type

33:29 of perceptual content sorry if if if there had to be awareness of every type of perceptual content then you would get a regress that he couldn't solve in this way and this is not a an original sort of view i i suggest there that there's you see gilbert reil talk about this in terms of self-intimation where he has in mind very something very specific that relates to the content of these um higher order states

34:00 and i also found it um i i ran across it just by sort of reading widely in the history of philosophy there was um there's an interesting very interesting uh philosopher i think he's i think he's in australia udo teal t-h-i-e-l who's written extensively about consciousness in the early modern period and it was through reading his um his research that i came across this criticism of john locke contemporary criticism of john locke which raises precisely this sort of worry there's no

34:32 trace of it in aristotle so what i did was i just said is does he have the resources to answer this could he could he stop this regress and one way to think of it is that he thinks that every act of um perception must be the an object of awareness but not every type that it instantiates and that would stop the regress from getting off out of the starting blocks so so the basic idea is that because the act is self-reflexive you're aware of it um

35:05 but not you're not aware of the the self-reflexive type uh the higher order content not every type it instantiates and that would be um i mean there would be good reason uh for thinking that he might have the motivation we don't have any extensive discussion in him but he seems to have to have this intuition that every token act must be an object of awareness we must must be conscious in that sense um but there's no reason to think that he would believe that every type even every mental type even every

35:38 content type was itself conscious in that way an object of awareness and that would hold generally i think uh for his views about perception of external objects so um so i have this is a paper which i have a draft version up on my academia.edu site on perceptual content in aristotle um it's under review i haven't i haven't revised it yet and sent it back and

36:10 i argue there that uh for a fairly rich notion of um perceptual content but one which uh in which uh the subject will not be aware of every perceptible feature that an object an external object instantiates so you would so the way i put it is that perception is selective it's not just that certain capacities like say vision are responsive to certain ranges of properties but even with an individual object of that type you might not be

36:46 perceiving all the relevant aspects and so this would just be parallel to that you might not be aware of all the features of your mental acts um and and that would be a good thing right because there's there would be so many different features that it would instantiate and it would be implausible to think that you were aware of all those things so so the view is right he's got this pervasive notion of consciousness all of these acts are conscious in the sense that they're objects of awareness

37:20 but not in every in every regard right so then what what do you think the content the exact like how could we specify the content of the higher order part of the awareness um is is it what's which uh form is it receiving like or something like that uh so well i mean that's an interesting question right so uh just that as a side note uh you're referring to his his account of further perception which involves receiving the form of the object the form of the perceptible object without

37:51 the matter right and um and i think many people take that to be a definition and so they say well if higher order awareness is a kind of perception then it must involve receiving the form um i actually just uh read something the other day by sophie chappelle that made just this move um you know just a week ago and uh i think there's no reason to infer that in fact i think it's unlikely that he has that view

38:23 um just for the following reason this is incidental to your question but but just for the following reason that that's a cause that's and he analyzes first order acts of perception causally and so there's a causal transaction between an external object which stimulates the organ and this and the capacity and brings it into activity and that that activation is to be understood in terms of receiving the form the perceptible form of the object so it's a causal analysis

38:57 of first order what i argued for in the consciousness paper is that aristotle can't view the self-reflexive nature of awareness causally because he thinks that this is actually it's immediate it's necessary it's um it's in it's infallible at least with regard to the existence of the object i mean there are a number of features about it right that make it very different he doesn't give an account of it but i'm just sort of pursuing the the implications

39:30 of this reading um so your question is okay well fine let's grant all that right what is um how are we supposed to understand this higher order content and i i think i'm inclined to resist the idea that it would be expressed as a propositional attitude in the sense that there's a you know a report of it would involve a dependent that clause right so i perceive that i am perceiving or i that i'm seeing a a lavender bush right something like that it doesn't preclude that but i don't

40:04 think it requires that okay and um for a simple reason i think that while some perceptual content can be articulated in that way for aristotle and is conceptual does have conceptual elements to it where there's both a subject which is uh the subject of the dependent clause is conceived of in a certain way and the predicate also in a certain way um i think that aerosols basic model of perceiving and i would extend i would extend it to

40:36 higher order perceiving is a kind of day-ray attitude so um the way i would formulate is instead of s perceives that p and we could break we could analyze p however you want um it's more that s perceives x as f right okay now for some people there's that's just a wash there's no difference between propositional content with that clause and perceiving an object as having a certain property because you would still be thinking of that object

41:09 as instantiating that property or exemplifying that property and therefore we're looking at something which is more like a state of affairs right the difference i take it is this that uh if you understand uh perceiving as a day-ray attitude in this way and i take it this is the basic notion that dretzki has knowledge in the flow of information okay is that there's some sort of engagement with an object

41:41 however it's described okay we can make true we can give true perceptual reports of the engagement with that object however it's described but our perception of it is uh is regarding it as having a certain characteristic a certain feature or property and that would belong typically within the the range of properties that that sensory organ is sensitive to right and

42:14 my suggestion in this paper this this unpublished paper is that that's um an essential feature of all perceiving for aristotle every including the perception of what he calls you know these special perceptibles like red you know flavors like um flavors like sweet and colors like red and temperatures like warm and so forth you're still perceiving this this particular object as warm and that that's true even for

42:48 young children who don't have a conceptual repertoire and haven't developed conceptual capacities fully and also for non-human animals who don't have according to aristotle don't have conceptual capacities it's that they have sensory receptors that are responsive to features to types of things um at the most basic level it will be built in it will be wired in that they're just responsive to certain ranges of qualities

43:20 um and it doesn't require uh in phrygian language right it doesn't require subsumption under a concept so i think that what i argue in that paper is that people move too quickly from um perceiving x as f to saying that means subsuming it under a concept that means right having conceptual capacities and if aristotle thinks that non-human animals don't have conceptual capacities and very young children don't have conceptual capacities then they can't perceive things as anything

43:52 and therefore are not responsive to it and that's clearly not aristotle's view aristotle thinks that our conceptual capacities the possession of particular concepts of say f or g or h whatever warm or sweet derives from perceptions of those very qualities and so he's got to have some sort of empirical story about how conceptual content and concept possession evolves from perceptual uh perceivings which have that very same content that's

44:25 in a simple case not logically complex concepts negative concepts things like that and so those basic perceptions have to have as features of their content general qualities or features even though you don't have a concept of them they have to be responsive to them and so and i think that there's textual evidence for that i think that aristotle talks in at least two places um in his posterior analytics about how perception

44:59 is uh that we always perceive particulars but perception is of the universal or general feature of them and i think the best way of understanding those two aspects of perception is with the day-ray attitude perception is always this direct relation to an actual particular object however you describe it there's a direct relationship there but it's being sensitive to some feature some general feature of that object and so

45:30 s perceives x as f for me is kind of the the canonical formulation of a perceptual report well that's a long way around to your question right so um the higher i would i would tend to that's how i would approach the higher or the content of the higher order perceiving right that it would be a kind of non-conceptual uh representation of the universal aspect of the first order perception it doesn't require the possession of concepts

46:02 i i don't want to exclude that you can have a conceptualized right perception i think that aristotle he doesn't talk about it much but he does mention it at various points about the ways that different mental faculties cooperate in um in the exercise of a single act and he doesn't have any problem with perceptions involving conceptual abilities so i don't want to exclude a more sophisticated perception his his whole ethics relies on exactly yeah those sorts of sophisticated

46:37 perceivings right yeah because he said you just see the correct action in the right circumstance you do or even if you want to be more conscious about it uh uh cautious about it excuse me he wants um the individual ethical agent to be sensitive to features of the situation often subtle features of the particular situation and has to have the kind of we would call it judgment but i don't mean that propositionally who has the sense right um

47:09 about which features are are are relevant in the circumstances ethically right that's highly um sophisticated right and has to involve all sorts of cognitive abilities right memory experience thought um and so forth uh but that can operate at um in a fairly immediate spontaneous sort of way as part of our everyday interactions without necessarily involving lots of reflection and introspection and things like that right so i think that you can have this more

47:42 sophisticated content i don't think it's required and he can't right because if if he really holds to this commitment he has about how pervasive perceptual consciousness is this is in um the nicomachean ethics in book nine chapter nine he just makes these incredible claims right that any activity that um an animate being has an animate being that has perception they're aware of it right

48:14 well if that's true of all animals who have perception he thinks that perception is what defines animals it distinguishes animals from say plants and if he thinks that goes all the way down to sea anemones right who retract when they're touched right and it's not clear what he thinks about sponges okay but but i mean if you have it going all the way down to very rudimentary animal life um where it seems reasonable to ascribe perception perceptual capacities to them and he says oh no no there if it's

48:48 perceiving they're they're aware that they're perceiving it sure better not be conceptual right yeah it's it's or or they better have concepts which he explicitly denies well he doesn't i mean he doesn't think that dogs or horses have yeah that's right and he's i mean he's very clear about the kinds of sophisticated activities that animals are capable of right uh you know so um i think there are all these stories in

49:23 the history of animals i mean there are various examples but there's stories in the history of animals of a horse um that has sex with another horse that's cloaked and it turns out to be its mother and then it goes off and kills itself um because it realizes that it's its mother you know i so is that true wow how much he believes um all this is another question and he recounts lots of stories in the history of animals but but

49:55 he's willing to ascribe to them a kind of who calls it intelligence right they're capable obviously capable of very sophisticated kinds of activities i mean one and one wonders if maybe this isn't partially if i could just interject there yeah that's one of the great things in richard swaraji's book animal minds and morals um that really looks at these richer perceptual activities and capabilities that animals have and he's he's absolutely right it's just scattered throughout the corpus

50:27 this recognition that animals can do quite a lot it's it's us who say well but they don't have concepts according to aristotle so how can they do all these things without possessing concepts right and and richard is exactly right to say because they think aristotle thinks that you could do it with other capacities that other capacities have are richer than than we had previously um thought yeah no i agree with that but what i was just about to ask and what make this makes me wonder is

50:59 well i guess i have a couple things one is i wonder if partially this is a terminological dispute about what counts as a concept because you might say that aristotle's notion of a concept is is pretty heavy duty um you know uh kind of thing that figures in you know universal statements and a and o statements or whatever right and uh we might have a lower bar for what counts as a concept same recognizing the same thing or something like that uh sorting and so animals clearly can do that so we might say that whether they have concepts could

51:31 ultimately become this kind of you know it's not if you mean concept a or and it is if you mean concept b um so do you think something like that could be going on with aristotle's notion of concept and if so why why should we adopt his way of using oh um so i think that i mean this is something that i do address in this unpublished paper right exactly that's on the website i mean i think that um i don't think it's just terminological um but i think it does require us to be careful about how we're using these terms so i think that very often

52:05 um philosophers not obviously not all not the ones who work on concepts in particular but many philosophers in reasoning about this um slide very easily between universals and concepts even the ones out there in the world that is exemplified in objects in the world the other is something that individual subjects possess can be said to possess there's a kind there's a kind of equivalence so that if you have one you have the other so if we're talking about universals as featuring in the content of mental states there must

52:38 be concepts that are possessed in some way or other and i think that um for dealing with somebody like aerosol it's absolutely right to focus on uh how universals feature in the content of various kinds of states and so at that level i i i would agree with you right you know he's going to say look uh on the view i'm putting forward reading i'm putting forward um perception is going to be of universals in a certain regard and thinking is going to be so why not just call them concepts

53:11 and i want to say yes to the first part that it's about universals that both of these different kinds of states perceptual states and um various kinds of higher cognitive states are about universals but um but the ways in which they grasp universals and the ways in which universals figure in the content of those states is different and we can specify the differences right so the sorts of tasks that one has to be capable of in perception with regard to universals like sorting recognition right that sort of thing um it is

53:45 is one kind of grasp as it were and what we can do with concepts that we possess is another thing so the ability to articulate in language the ability to generalize and infer um there are certain kinds of abstract uh functions that we're capable of uh in virtue of possessing a concept both of these involve universals i'll grant you that but the kinds of activities that are involved and the capacities for them are different and i think that it's useful to say that concept possession is about this

54:20 abstract rational ability and um things like recognition while they're connected and we can draw um connections between them aerosol thinks one evolves out of the other right uh that they're fundamentally different functions and at bottom different functions so and what so if even if you accepted that like uh that they're different and i agree with you they are different and one thing you might add to that is kind of the thing that jerry foter talked about just like being able to think about f as f like we already think about

54:54 it as that sort of thing um and so i guess aristotle would deny that animals could do that as well though they could perceive it as that sort of thing but they couldn't think about it i guess but okay but so even if you granted all that i wonder why you wouldn't want to call that sort of thing a concept um so granted you can't do these other things with it but but if it's uh yeah i guess i just i guess i don't really see why you would want a reserve concept for the more heavy duty thing um

55:27 well at a certain level you might not worry i just think that um that these different kinds of activities are sufficiently different that it's it's useful to speak about them differently um so for example i think that what's really crucial about um the capacity for inference say has to do with um you know the generality of these terms and their our ability to uh to combine them and recombine them in different sorts of ways right so the kind of thing evans has in mind when he talks about right

55:59 the generality constraint and so forth and those sorts of those sorts of moves are not uh it's not necessary that you have those abilities uh in order to sort things to recognize something as being of a particular type to respond to it in certain ways if it's of a certain type um not having linguistic abilities not having inferential abilities and so forth and so uh it seems to me that there's something quite distinctive that one acquires when one

56:33 um acquires a concept in this more general and rational sense and and that that and and it's useful to distinguish those two if if you want to use the the familiar word concept for all of them okay but when we talk about concept possession we have often have in mind um linguistic dispositions and you know various kinds of rational dispositions in terms of inference and so forth and that's not that's not required yeah

57:06 that's not required i i agree with that um so what would aristotle deny that they can think about like can a raven think about uh can have thoughts at all or they that's just something they can't do right don't they only perceive so i know there are passages where he says like you know the lion just perceives that this is its food um it sort of sees directly or some in some sense it is food but it doesn't ever have thoughts about that is that on his view right he doesn't think that their thoughts he's very clear right that they don't have intellect or understanding and in greek

57:41 it's moose right and as a result of that they don't have no amita they don't have uh what we would i think we would translate as concepts um they do lots of things that that you and i might describe as as thinking or casually there says the lion smells or the uh the lion hears the lowing of the cattle right and he thinks you know he thinks to himself uh there's dinner right right so aristotle describes exactly this feature this um scenario in

58:15 the nick mckean ethics in book 3 chapter 10 and it's a very interesting passage where he's pretty complex reactions to a lion but he's not explaining it in terms of thinking so this line has some experience it has memories which have collated in certain ways so um he can recognize that it's cattle and he has some memory of cattle being delicious

58:47 right so he hears the lowing and he starts to salivate right so so what is that well you might be inclined to say these he thinks oh there are cattle over the hill and he thinks that could be my next meal and he infers from that right that would be delicious and i'm hungry and then starts to salivate but that whole story uh that we've just projected on to this cattle is is one theory but it's not by any means an inevitable uh kind of kind of account to give and i think that what he what aerosol seems to

59:20 want to do is to say uh no it's all done through perceptual abilities memory experience perceiving and um these can be combined in certain ways um that would explain are sufficient to explain adequately explain the lion's behavior it's salivating it's um getting poised uh to you know to chase um and so forth um and it's all goal directed and all that stuff but that's going to be understood in terms of these different capacities and their responsiveness

59:55 to certain perceptual features of the environment yeah and so one question i have about this is sort of an extra a side question but i've since you're we're talking about this um i wonder if i could ask you uh one question that has i'm thinking about is with with respect to the practical syllogism yeah so when in human actions right there the the major premise of the practical syllogism is a conceptual thing it's like you know all of these things are all of these things are sweet or something and the second one is the perceptual bit this

1:00:28 thing is sweet or something and then so the conclusion is like eat it or something um so but that's not the way we explain the lion's behavior uh so i'm wondering why can why couldn't we give the same explanation of human behavior without all this extra cognitive stuff um not not to say it's not there but why does it feature an explanation of behavior so so in my on my view uh just before i get to the practical on my view this more rudimentary explanation is um will work for human

1:01:03 beings in certain circumstances oh okay it's just that human beings are also capable of of of high much more highly cognitive versions of this as well um so so uh uh the same kinds of explanations will apply to us but then we can add to that because we've got these additional capacities which are integrated together with perception but the point you raise about the perception the practical syllogism is um is really right right on target because

1:01:34 that's an inference right and if you take the practical syllogism here so we're you know we're thinking of um nick mckee and ethics book seven chapter three in particular but also in his essay on the motion of animals right in chapter seven at much greater length um it looks like he's explaining action as resulting from reasoning through deliberating through various premises even if it's a short sequence in on the motion of animals it's a longer sequence or allows for that

1:02:09 uh and then acting on that basis it looks highly rational right um and he doesn't he clearly doesn't intend that to only apply to cases where you are consciously uh reflecting on what should i do and if i do this i do this and and you know this is the occasion and now i better act uh he has in mind things that are much more spontaneous right and in the on the motion of animals it's explicit that it's to apply to animals too right so if you if you

1:02:43 if you think that it involves inference and if you think that inference necessarily involves concepts then suddenly he would be ascribing rational abilities and concept possession quite widely i myself am inclined to think that even though there are there are elements of these passages especially in on the motion of animals that um that look like they're talking about psychologically real processes that the a more charitable way of

1:03:17 understanding both of these passages is that they're ex they're explanatory reconstructions that um that make sense make intelligible why animals including human animals respond in the ways that they do because they've got certain commitments certain general commitments like you know like um uh you know cattle you know a beef is tasty right and there's some beef right yeah and the lion and the lion moves on it um

1:03:50 they involve certain general commitments about um what is attractive or repellent uh of what is good beneficial or harmful and then certain immediate perceptions about the the sorry perceptions about the immediate environment one finds oneself in and if you view it in that sort of context then our explanation of behavior will go through an inference but it needn't be a psychologically real process that the subject is going through in particular the the

1:04:22 lion is not going through inferences and most of us don't either most of the time um but but our action is intelligible because it exhibits that structure it it manifests that that's right so it's it's a an artifact of explanation of the behavior but not a causal explanation of it but more like a rational interpretation of it it's a rational interpretation of it but it's not unconnected with the causal processes so um

1:04:54 to give you the the rational explanation i've got to use inferences i'm going to use concepts often quite sophisticated concepts like say pray or predator right something like that that we wouldn't necessarily we wouldn't describe a concept of predator right to the sheep that's trembling right um but we but at the same time it's not um projected onto the sheet without any kind of a ground or basis right so the the thought would be um

1:05:27 sheep are responsive to um to seeing wolves they they're appropriately afraid because they recognize right that that's um that's in some sense we would say that's dangerous but how are they going to do that without having a concept well they're sensitive to certain perceptual types or a certain kind of perceptual universals uh that we would articulate using vocabulary like predator and so forth and so so the rational explanation will

1:06:00 be a lot um beefier right than than the causal explanation but it's not that the causal explanation is non-cognitive right um or unrelated to the general features which are cited in the rational explanation that's what's nice yeah interesting i mean going back to this the stuff about perception really fast it i really found this paper really interesting i'll put links to all this by the way after uh word so that people can find the stuff on your on your page um but because you know i was taught the basic i think kind of canonical line

1:06:33 which is that aristotle says you perceive particular things and you think about universal things and what you try to do is split the difference basically so you always perceive a particular thing but as having a universal attribute or something like that that's right and i think that's really interesting reading although i was trying to make sense of like what the actual mental state that you would be in what the content that it would have is so on your view is it that there's like a in our modern language we would say like a qualitative

1:07:06 aspect to it that represents the universal type but isn't conceptual or like what exactly so i know you put in terms of like it's state non-conceptual not you know they so we have these distincts we make but i still wasn't sure exactly what you thought the the content of it was or how it connected to the universal right so i want to avoid um i want to avoid framing it in terms of um qualia or things like that because i don't think that aristotle has a kind of indirect realism i mean some people do

1:07:38 think that he's committed to this where you're aware of something which is somehow internal to the system whether it's sense data and qualia or whether it's um the representations that one is aware of them and thereby aware of something in the world i think that aristotle thinks we're aware and animals are aware of features of the world um but the idea is is roughly this that um it's it's it's not the case as some people often phrase it that um uh our senses just

1:08:13 register that's the word that that people often use they just register qualities like red yellow right i think it's much more like what richard swaraj said which is um you know the horse can detect an odor in a certain direction so it's you know um pungent here or you know um acrid there right um and uh so there's gonna be it's it's going to be um we might say it's predictive in some basic sense it's combining things in a certain way

1:08:46 um it's seeing this as that right um but it's not going to involve uh concepts it's not going to involve propositional attitudes it's going to be um what i was called describing before is a de-re attitude where where you have a relationship to a particular object as exemplifying a certain type or kind of how does it do it i guess is what i'm asking how does the ass bit get in there um i don't think we get more than this is something like this

1:09:22 um uh percep perception is brought about by perceptible objects acting on us and so we perceive that very thing which is acting on us as f where f is within the range of um sensitivities that that organ has right so i've got color detectors and to an extent shape detectors right and so uh you know my eyes are responding to this

1:09:55 as square or as blue something like that and if you say well how does it get blue in there it's going to be well uh when a blue thing acts on my eye um it's blueness it's it's being blue uh acts upon uh the eyeball in a particular way so that i'm aware of it as blue how is that well aerosol says in on the soul book 2 chapter 12 right that it receives the form of that object and then he says this troubling

1:10:30 mysterious phrase without the matter that everybody's fought about for over 2 000 years and and and my account of that is that um talk about reception for aerosol just means taking on equality and the simplest reading is the kind that that richard swaraj steve neverson others uh mentioned which is well it's just exemplifying the very quality that the object has right so just the same way you heat a t the water in a tea kettle right

1:11:02 the heat from the heating element the flame or the the electrical element is warm and it makes the water warm the water receives warmth from the heating element okay right so too in perception blue objects make my eye go blue something like that now i think that that's wrong for various reasons and there's an extensive discussion of all the different interpretations in a paper of mine called the spirit and the letter because there are these two positions on the spouse one is called

1:11:35 literalism the one i just described and another one called spiritualism because of something thomas aquinas said and it doesn't matter so that but and aristotle does say that the the eye or the it becomes colored but not like in the same way as the object is colored which is against literalism i guess right so that's a later a later passage in um in uh in dianamous on seoul book three chapter two um but also controversial it's all controversial um but but what i've argued and i think i

1:12:09 put this paper a recent paper up on um academia.edu as well uh on arizona on the transmission of information how to receive form without the matter and or receiving form without the matter and um that's an expansion of the last part of my paper on the spirit in the letter where i say here's an alternative view it's a physical interaction this is brought about by ordinary physical objects with their physical properties like color he thinks that's a real property of external

1:12:43 objects colors odors and so forth and those properties stimulate our organs in a particular way but not in a way where the cul the quality is replicated or duplicated so when you warm the water in your kettle you do replicate the warmth you cause there to be the same kind very same kind of quality in the object that's acted on right in this case it is like that in a way but not exactly like that and that's what without the

1:13:16 matter means is that you don't the subject the the sense organs of the subject don't um embody that very quality so that's how i'm understanding without the matter is they don't embody that very quality by replicating it they only take on a certain abstract feature of that quality aristotle thinks it's a proportion that all perceptible qualities can be understood as ratios of of particular quality so every color is a ratio of black to white and so the idea is that it that's

1:13:52 actually a defining feature of each of the colors so it's not just any abstract feature it's a defining feature something that's essential to each of those specific perceptible qualities that that abstract feature is instantiated in the organ so when the blue thing acts on my eye it doesn't make it blue but it does make it take on a certain ratio of qualities that make it blue when it's instantiated in that material the difference is that my eye jelly is

1:14:26 transparent and that ratio is not instantiated in colors in the eyeball that's why it doesn't go blue but it's instantiated into other two other qualities if it does that that's speculative on my part but if it does that then it's something like what we call transduction right so there's a certain pattern of energy or change uh in an object right that's um that is preserved right that signal is preserved in a different

1:14:58 medium right through causal means right we you know um if you think about sound recording and the way in which we play back sound recording through speakers and so forth right there's the idea is that a certain say melody is preserved as a signal throughout all of those different changes and it's embodied at each stage in different material forms right that are causally related and causally related to the playback at the end at the final statement when we replay it through our speakers so that we can hear it but the idea is

1:15:33 that it's that abstract feature which is transmitted and it's not as i said any abstract feature it's not accidental to the melody or the color or things like that but it's what is essential to its being that color or that melody if that's what receiving form without the matter is then there's an explanation right for why i am perceiving this this object which is currently acting on me as blue is i've it's made me take on a certain ratio that's essential

1:16:09 to its being blue and i see it as blue because i have i've received from it that very same ratio yeah i mean when you put it that way it is it is kind of almost it almost i mean i don't know yeah almost beggars belief that aerosol didn't come on something like the heart problem because here we have an abstract thing a ratio being instantiated in me we also have an awareness in me of that perceptual state and and yet i perceive it as blue out

1:16:43 there um and but my eye doesn't turn blue in any way even though i have an essential feature of that thing so it just seems like yeah it's kind of interesting that he doesn't come up with the idea or wrestle with the idea of how something that's a physical because i assume he thinks it's a physical state i mean aristotle is not a dualist in any way that i right i think that's right i read them so there's a physical state of the of the eye yeah which is instantiating this but yet representing the blue out there and i don't experience it as a property of myself i mean i think that's the central point of your that's cartesian theater

1:17:15 paper is that it's it's wrong to interpret them that way that's right so yeah i don't know there's so so i think why does he think this is unproblematic i guess is what i would say well so i think that i i i mean for me the the kind of the the the pivotal point is that all of this machinery this internal machinery whether it's physical so he thinks it's taking place in the heart and the bloodstream uh which he thinks is coming you know through um the various uh sensory channels from the peripheral sense organs

1:17:47 he doesn't think that i don't think he thinks that we're aware of those bodies as such or their states as such um and i also don't think that he thinks that we're aware of mental entities like images or sense data or things like that as you said right in his view we're aware of objects in the world that are acting on us and their perceptible properties out there now what does that mean well it means he's

1:18:19 thinking of all of what's going on inside of us which does have a physical basis as um as under the hood it's it's it's by undergoing those changes in that way that we're aware of objects in the world it's not by being aware of those changes it's but just by having them so there's a very it's a very good example this is something i hit hit on early in my career it was while i was doing my dissertation there's this funny little digression

1:18:53 in the second chapter of on memory and recollection short essay in memory and recollection it's in chapter two and what he's interested in the context then is um how do we order our memories chronologically how do we know that something is earlier rather than later and so forth and there's this complex discussion about time stamps you know how we date stamp these different things and how we can judge that something is further away or closer um temporally

1:19:27 and in the middle of this there's this funny little digression which says it's got to be the same way that we think about objects that are large and far away he says it's not he says by thoughts stretching out to those objects the way that there are these extra mission theories of vision right which have some ocular ray leaving the eye and going out there in the world he says it's not like that because you can think of things you think in the same way he says even when they don't exist and if they don't exist then it

1:20:00 can't go there's nowhere to go to right so he says and this is the for me was the really kind of pivotal point he said he says it's by the proportionate change it's by undergoing a change not by being aware of a change that models the objects thought about but by having a change by undergoing a change and then there's this a series of like four to six lines where he describes quite complex four-dimensional analog representations of objects interacting

1:20:33 in the world he says you've got the same he says you've got uh and that preserve the proportions right the relation structure and the proportions of the objects in the worlds he says you you they have proportional um magnitudes they have proportional shapes they have proportional distances they have proportional changes right so it's kind of like uh there's this old book i think it's from the 40s uh by a man named craig c-r-a-i-k it's called the nature of explanation well the middle chapter about this is about theory of

1:21:05 representation except that the and you could think it was just like voter right um or politician somebody like that except that he was talking about analog um representations he was talking about the kelvin tide predictor and stuff like that right and the way in which right certain um stimuli are translated into a model transformations are performed on the model and you get certain output which then can apply to things in the world

1:21:38 and it just seems to me this is exactly like that there's nothing here that's said about watching or observing or imagining it's just by undergoing undergoing these changes and so for i guess in a way a lot of this stuff for me comes back to an old scholastic distinction um that i think is really useful uh it's the difference between when thinking about representations it's the difference between that towards which

1:22:10 a representation is directed so in latin ad kwem the id that towards which it's directed or focused on and the id that by which it's right on something we would say the vehicle uh right um or the features of that vehicle right in virtue of which it has that kind of content right exactly and i think that you know you see in like early modern theories the idea is that these two go together and so it's by being aware of a representation

1:22:42 which is directed at this object that we're aware of the object and i think that the great move that was made in the 20th century is to just leave behind this question of the the odd queen that towards which it's directed and say no it's just that by which representations are that by which we're aware of other things and we separate them in that way and i think that the very same uh distinction fairly simple distinction but basic distinction is true when we look at ancient representationals like

1:23:15 aristotle and stoics so so then the basic idea then is that for aristotle you're aware of the representation but what you're aware of the content of the representation as opposed to it's vehicle i think that although there might be exceptional circumstances where you are aware of your representation i think in general he doesn't think you're aware of the representation he doesn't he doesn't it's that by having the representation one either is aware of some object in the world or in a case like dreaming it

1:23:51 seems that one is aware of objects in the world but one's not aware of the representation itself that's merely the means by which we're aware of these things i guess the only reason why i'm puzzled is because that sounds like a very much like a a modern first order representationalism like dretzki but how do you factor in the awareness of the the perception of the perception into this feature because there seems like get into a little bit of trouble uh-huh yeah that's that's not going to be accounted for in the same one i think i

1:24:25 i i think that's a very perceptive point um in the consciousness paper i i point out that this can't this aspect of his theory can't be handled in just the same way he doesn't have an account of that i think that it's not because of the way he characterizes or the way anyway he's committed to thinking about it uh it can't be a causal uh uh effect and it can't be representational

1:24:58 and so so there is i think there is something of a mystery right on the on the reading that um that i favor i think and i think is grounded in the text as to how that would be explained uh we've clearly got a commitment to the fact that we always are rude of these individual acts and various features of that argument it seems to me commit him to the view that it can't be a causal product because he thinks it's necessary it's oh it always it's always present

1:25:32 and it can't be representational in just the sort of sense that we're talking about because it's not subject to error for example right either and so uh yeah i don't think there that he gives or suggests um an account of that i think that's where it runs out yeah yeah interesting and but but also so but the awareness has to be an awareness of a representation though even if it is no no no no confrontational no i'm rejecting that okay i'm so it's awareness of the content of the representation it's

1:26:05 having the content which would be about objects in the world or seems to be about objects in the world when it's actually not right but what i was asking about was the higher order awareness it's an awareness of a representation oh you mean so like um so he seems committed to the view that we are aware of representations when we have them we are aware of the states we're in but not the representation are you thinking about a case like lucid dreaming

1:26:36 right that's one example right right so uh so i'm dreaming and i go wow and aristotle surprisingly talks about lucid dreaming he does exactly he says it's kind of common actually which i found surprising yeah right that's right um yeah so so i think what's going on there is uh so the dream itself is dreaming itself is um the active use of these representations these what he calls fantasmata which repre which have content and

1:27:08 represent objects in the world and they'll be very complex and they're obviously involving scenarios and changes over time that's what they're representing but i don't think that he thinks that you're aware of the representations as such you seem to be aware of objects in the external world except that you're dreaming so you're not really aware of objects in the external world but the representations are distinct from the objects you seem to be seeing okay so that's what that this paper on the cartesian theater is about right right what you're saying is okay but um

1:27:43 dreaming is an activity so that argument we had earlier about consciousness suggests you could be aware that you're dreaming he certainly thinks that's the case how does that work um so i would say that that's you're aware of the activity but not that you're aware of the representation so you're aware of the activity and the activity has a certain content you're dreaming a specific scenario and you're aware of that just the same way when you're perceiving you perceive that you're hearing a bell

1:28:16 ring or something like that and so that awareness i think would include at least some of that first order content but i don't think and and what's more is i'll just say this things like dreaming or imagining will be at least in my view for aristotle uh examples of say visualization so there'll be some kind of a current activity which involves a seeming awareness of objects and so you'll be aware of that

1:28:51 and presumably some of the content of that but you're not aware of the representation and virtue of which you have that content so that's the big fuss in that recent paper is all about saying you're mixing two different levels of explanation or the theory you're you're mixing a phenomenological description of the experience with the explanatory account that tells you why you're having that particular phenomenological

1:29:23 experience with that particular content and awareness is directed at this activity at the phenomenological level i would i would suggest an answer to your question right so yeah that's interesting so it's almost like the thing you were saying before about the blood and and so forth you have all these things going on underneath the hood which generate the phenomenology and that's the level at which the awareness so that's personal level almost if you want to import that kind of dignity and way of talking and right the sub-personal level the thing that explains it is all this other stuff

1:29:56 which is outside of awareness right but he and right and the crucial thing in that this this most recent paper is that uh at this in when you're giving this that second account about what goes on at the sub-personal level awareness doesn't feature at that right in that part of the account that's how you're exercising right the cartesian ghosts right and homunculi and stuff like that is that you're that awareness belongs to the phenomenological description or anyway the the personal description right of what's going on but not at this at the

1:30:29 sub-personal level and that does distinguish it from i think pretty much almost every other account of aerosols theory of memory and dreams where it seems like it involves images of which we are aware and by being aware of these images we have memories or dreams of external objects and this is saying no the subpersonal account involves representations but not awareness of them and okay that yeah that's really interesting

1:31:05 because yeah that's that's an that's a very sophisticated view um if that's the correct reading which is it is right so the the the bulk of that paper i mean these are all long papers but the bulk of the paper is trying to say here's what the texts actually say and if you're paying attention if you don't just kind of do broad brushstrokes and gloss over it at a high altitude you know to mix metaphors um instead you look at the details of the text that's actually what the texts are describing um and it's kind of goes i mean for

1:31:39 those who really like the the blow-by-blow descriptions these papers are saying just look at the other interpretations can we make sense of this phrase can we make sense of that phrase how does that actually work but my claim is that yeah actually those kinds of details though they're very sophisticated seem to be present in the text they're best accounted for in this way yeah no and i agree that the papers are very careful and go through all the different interpretations and that's one of the nice things about reading your work if you like ancient philosophy that's the that's the way you should do

1:32:11 it it's by careful textual analysis putting the greek up there and giving that say just how do we fit this all together you know let's let's assume that's it he's not yeah not so that's really nice um so i wonder if just so generally speaking we're talking a lot about perception um and so i'm wondering if it would be so clearly i think uh you're right aristotle doesn't have a sense data view he's not committed to the cartesian theater um but and he is a kind of representationalist in the sense that we were talking about but it's he is but he also is committed to the view i think so

1:32:45 you let me ask you if this is right to the view that the sensible qualities are properties of the world as we sense them like the blueness it's not like you know the kind that secondary properties that you find in lock where it's like okay so blue is in our experience but then out there is something which causes it and we can call that blue if we want to but it's not blue aristotle's view is the blue is out there on the surface of the objects right that's right was he a kind of naive realist then um or would that be going too far yeah so i don't think he's a i don't think he's a naive realist i do think

1:33:17 he's a direct realist director yeah okay i think he is committed to realism about perceptible qualities um uh i i think and i think that he thinks that if you're healthy and at the right distance and all that sort of thing that you see objects as they are um i think his claims about infallibility have to do more with proximal stimuli but i think that when it comes to distal objects um he thinks that you can get it right and what you and the world is the way you see it

1:33:50 um so so the blue is really out there uh i think the difference between my sort of view and say an interpretation like uh sarah brody's or miles bernie written on this sort of thing is that they sort of think that it just stops at that naive level it's just like the blue is out there and blue does what blue does because it's blue and it makes your it makes you see blue and there really is no more explanation to be had

1:34:24 um and what i do there's so there's a paper on the reality of color and other perceptible qualities um and uh and that argues that um that's not the end of the story for aristotle there's all this detail in his treatise on um on perception and sense organs on the desensu that is um that focuses on the quantitative basis or framework for understanding quality spaces

1:34:58 so he thinks that not just tones musical tones which were widely recognized as functions of of ratios or proportions um or were identified even with those proportions um that it's also true about color and about flavor and about odor and i think he he doesn't discuss it but i think he takes it for granted the same is true about temperatures and about uh moisture um at least it's not as hard to

1:35:31 you know to take that on board so the really interesting thing about the desensu is that he's he's extending the kind of theory that the pythagoreans have made widespread about music to other sorts of quality spaces perceptible quality spaces he doesn't he's very explicit that you cannot reduce perceptible qualities to numbers or ratios so in chapter four of the day senzu he he ridicules democritus for making

1:36:03 um arithmetic and geometric properties primary right so that's just wrong right the primary qualities are colors and flavors and odors and things like shape which he calls common perceptibles right shape and size and so forth our understanding of that is um parasitic on our understanding of colors and flavors and odors and so forth so he thinks that they're not secondary qualities all their primary qualities of the object

1:36:37 but that's compatible with having his having this view that their material basis involves essentially involves proportions and so there's a lot of discussion in chapter three and chapter four um uh and chapter five of the um of the sensu about the different uh ratios and how they um underlie different perceptible qualities

1:37:09 and i i think i think that that's that's a really fascinating that's a very sophisticated sort of view so so uh it's not just that blue is out there but blue is a certain proportion of certain places he's going to say light to dark or white to black but another place he's going to say it has to do with the proportion of the transparent a certain material nature he describes it as a material in nature and bodies the mixture of the transparent with earth which gives it opacity and he thinks

1:37:42 that the that mixture which would be according to a certain proportion will give you certain hues in the color spectrum he doesn't want to reduce it to the numeric ratio but he thinks that there's an underlying underlying material story and that that underlying material story is relevant to i think to his account of of what we perceive yeah i mean it's interesting because here as in some other places you find them kind of walking the middle between

1:38:14 what are usually thought of as diametrically opposed views because on the one hand you have the direct realists in the in the contemporary period i mean yeah and then on the other hand you have the representationalists and they usually battle each other like you know which is it and aristotle seems to be sort of saying both that we have these representations but they're also direct we're directly aware of the objects as they are and that's not a package of views that you find very often in the contemporary literature i don't think no right well i mean you know the phrase direct realism is so abused it's it's hard to

1:38:47 to know exactly but but i'm taking the view that um direct realism is distinct from naive realism um and then what's important about direct realism is one of the most salient things about it is that it's not indirect realism right so that it's not um it doesn't involve awareness of the it doesn't essentially involve awareness of the representation okay so and whereas naive realism is that the kind of you're the openness to the property um without any without a representation right so on this view

1:39:20 direct realism so naive realism i assume would be a form of direct realism right but i think that also another form would be a representationalist view and i i i've argued against you know over the years i've argued against naive realist uh readings of of aristotle on this account i see okay because so yeah so uh so another word for naive realism might be relationalism that there's just a relation between you and the property but that's not mediated by a representation

1:39:54 that's not mediated by rep right so i so i'm comfortable with there being this direct relation to the object that perception for aristotle's object involving um i i can i can take on board all of that um but i think that it is mediated by a representation not a representation of which you're aware right right as on the indirect realist view but by which you're aware of a feature in the world and um it's it's that uh it's this more radical claim of the naive realist that it's

1:40:28 simply the presence of the object in the act um which is essential to perception and and that it doesn't involve a representation that's what i'm that's what i'm objecting to right i see and then so you you're the direct realism is to emphasize there's no veil of perception as you might find in certain like lock-in views although so that's exactly right i have um i have a paper but it's too drafty to uh to really share but i read around for a long time and i shelved and i'm now taking it off the shelf again

1:41:00 called the veil of perception and it's about the history of representationalism so um you know there uh there are interesting questions about the veil of perception and where does this problem arise and is it an exclusively modern problem and the way in which it gives rise to either forms of skepticism or in the early modern and late modern period to idealism so it's most often brought up by idealists um barclay doesn't use the phrase but you've got the idea there hegel very definitely uses it the poet shelley uses it um

1:41:33 bradley uses versions of it um t.s eliot uses it you just see it uh you know when when when russell talks about it in knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description he's got in mind bradley and barkley it's just it's idealism he's worried about so you might think it's just this is just a a a modern problematic and what this paper does is it says actually if you go backwards chronologically you can see it very clearly in late antiquity so you see it very very clearly in platinus a short essay on memory

1:42:06 a very clear example another very clear example of it is in sexist empiricus this piranus skeptic who's uh who has this who has the very example you would expect he says it's like having a portrait of socrates and not knowing or having access to socrates all you've got are the portraits right um and and there's an interesting question as to like how much further does it go back sextus thinks that it at least is present in this lesser-known group called the cyrenaics

1:42:41 i think he's wrong about that but he's he sees it there platinus is probably criticizing both aristotle and stoics who in my view are both representationalists and so there's this interesting historical puzzle which is in this earlier period right at the the end of the classical period beginning of the hellenistic period we've got representationalism you can even go further gorgeous has a view like this in the incoming column and you can think of this as just being seen as unproblematic you don't see anything like the veil of

1:43:14 perception problem if you go to later antiquity in the imperial period it's just taken for granted that it gives rise to the available this they don't call it the veil of perception but the same the same problem about skepticism and so forth just and they take it to be so obvious as as to be decisive just the way we we use the description veil of perception as a as a damning critique it's dead on arrival right okay so the question behind the paper that i was

1:43:46 and the reason why i shelved it for many years was what happens in the history of representationalism that goes from not being a problem at all to being taken as an obvious and decisive problem right and i think that um and before i thought there just has to be this explanation it has to be a really good argument there has to be uncovering some commitment and once you see the commitment it's all over and i shelved the paper for for quite a few years

1:44:19 maybe 10 years i shelved it because i couldn't find a st an intelligible story that would diagnose the transformation um and i've come to think actually you know the aerosol and stoics they're fine they're representational it doesn't give rise to the veil of perception problem they didn't have to be troubled by it and these later philosophers skeptics idealists and so forth they think it's a problem because

1:44:52 they've got in mind a particular view of representationalism which these older representations are just not committed to at all and it hinges on precisely that scholastic distinction i was mentioning which is they take it to be essential to representationalism that you're aware of the representation and it's by being aware of the representation that you're aware of me that's that that's the sense of mediation strong sense of mediation by which you're aware of things in the world and so what's crucial is not just that there's something mediating but

1:45:24 that it's through awareness of this intermediate entity that you're aware of something further and so that there you get the sense of indirectness in that awareness of objects in the world is mediated by awareness of something inter in between and i don't think i don't think they're committed to that to that view at all and what made me take the paper off the shelf uh was i was talking to one of my colleagues rich thomason and he was um uh he was saying to me he said why do you think

1:45:57 that there's this um there's this kind of intelligible explanation for this shift um he says if you think about the philosophical paradigm shifts in our own lifetime right about the causal theory of reference right um or other i mean he he came up with a couple of different examples about the status of modal metaphysics and so forth he said the fact is those took place almost overnight yeah you know people just kind of got went why do we think that they

1:46:29 just shrugged and said no it looks like we can just go ahead with this this other way of doing you know yeah coin died that's what happened and people were like oh that's right it's fine right you know so it's it's like there wasn't going to be a theoretical or intelligible explanation of it the thing that was it that interested me in you know when he said this to me and and the veil fell from my eyes was that the first part of this paper is focused on the imagery of the veil of perception so i start out the paper by saying you know

1:47:04 where does this expression come from because it has such a grip on us this model right that right the idea is that instead of representations revealing the world they they cover it right they screen it off right and this is really powerful paradoxical kind of image right and then and and you can see this very clearly in hegel for example one of the earliest examples of the precise metaphor for the same philosophical end that i found is in the phenomenology of spirit and he says in the section of

1:47:38 consciousness right it's and it's already very sophisticated says if consciousness were to go behind the so-called curtain so he says so-called curtains it's already in the air somebody's already been talking about this but he says if consciousness were to go behind the so-called curtain all it would find is itself right so there's this idealist move right yeah right at the beginning of the 19th century and and so i was really fascinated by this metaphor because it's not in

1:48:10 the british authors the early modern authors right you do get one or two cases in thomas reid but for a totally totally unrelated point barkley talks about the veil of words but he just means obscurantism it's just totally different but there are veils all over the place in 19th and 20th century philosophy some of them related to a greater extent some to a lesser extent there's a whole tradition going back to the renaissance about the veil of isis which is very much involved in

1:48:43 early modern science and occult properties and things like this in the investigation of nature these have all sorts of antecedents so i was really i was fascinated by the veil of tears too right uh that's totally different that's unrelated right so this is this is concerned with veils curtains coverings uh the veil of isis is actually her robe or her dress i mean it's okay it's that whole thing is about un um unclothing um uh uh uh

1:49:16 nature itself it's been taking her clothes off and it's this is all really actually wrapped up in the whole imagery of it it's really fascinating pierre doe has a very interesting book on the history of it but the the so that so the idea of veiling is old and i was and there is stuff in antiquity there's stuff actually in plato and plato's gorgeous that's relevant but but what was interesting and what rich made me aware of is that the power of these metaphors quite apart

1:49:48 from the arguments the analysis of the argument from illusion the argument from hallucination our examination of various premises or presuppositions of these arguments whether they're true or not or when understood in one way or understood in another way that's all that's all familiar that's all of our familiar tools you know that we use right to understand these things but what what the paper had made clear to me and rich brought home to me is the way in which uh there's more than that going on when we when we find

1:50:22 certain models to be productive or to kind of cloak close off um progress and this is a clear example of that i think that in late antiquity sextus and plutonius reject the representationalism of the aerosol and stoics on not frivolous grounds but mistaken grounds they conceive of it in a very specific way and there's no reason to think that either aristotle or the stoics have those commitments and it i think it

1:50:56 took i think it really took until the 20th century before representationalism was rehabilitated where people could say it doesn't require it doesn't require that right you can just be thinking about um the properties which are content bearing right and and which enable us to have personal mental states about objects in the world right yeah that's that's so fascinating so you don't think that you find something like this in democritus or in maybe even parmenides

1:51:30 that that kind of screening off or veil so you know the the idea that you know by convention sweet by convention hot everything else adam's in the void or that's not that's not uh you don't think that that kind of can be imported to them so you do get skepticism earlier on that's absolutely right and you do get um interest in illusions and hallucinations from early on so that's that's completely correct as well um but i i take it that what's distinctive about the veil of perception

1:52:03 set of issues is that we take the very means by which we were supposed to grasp the world to be the source of the problem themselves i see that it's precisely them that block off or screen the world the idea that knowledge is difficult or things occlude our vision or you know and so forth that's just a general problem about you know what do we have knowledge of and what do we not have knowledge of but the idea that the very thing that was supposed to enable us prevents us

1:52:36 is what makes us so gripping i mean i guess the reason because there's like fragments of democritus that sort of suggests something like that where he says you know the reason overturns the senses and the senses sort of say back by what right do you overturn us we're like the source of everything or something absolutely right and um and zenophonies talks about their being that everything is wrought over with seeming right that there's appearance right but but not not getting access to reality itself and i think that early academic skeptics like our

1:53:09 kessiles really look back to this earlier tradition about the senses deceiving us and illusion and appearance and draw a lot from that and i think in i discuss them in this paper as well i think that i mean our castle is actually it's funny he actually interprets an early line in he see it as he has a different reading of it i think he's probably punting in rather than reading a different text but he sees he see it as in a way kind of in this in this whole tradition

1:53:43 um i think that the academics are actually right that there is this strand of the tradition but a lot of that is um is uh worries about how difficult knowledge is the ways in which we go astray um uh and um how the senses though we rely on them are not really reliable right um none of that involves this radical kind of um that it's perverse in its very roots

1:54:16 um so here's here's an example of something early it doesn't have to do with epistemology it has to do with ethics but at the end of the gorgeous um in the eschatological section about the afterlife uh socrates says is plato's gorgeous socrates says um we can't have true justice on earth uh because we have embodied souls judging other embodied souls and

1:54:48 our eyes and our ears deceive us about the nature of the souls that we see and it's only when we have disembodied souls he says one naked soul judging another naked soul where they can see the true content of their character that we would have true justice now that's about about ethical qualities right rather than perceptible qualities but but the but there the idea is is that that our eyes and ears don't reveal they they they

1:55:20 they occlude by their they prevent us that you it's it's not that you could get if you could only get a better view if i viewed in the right conditions i'd get it right it's that there's no way right to see things correctly with the organs of sight right um you have to you have to see in some other way through the soul right and so that's what that's what that thing you were mentioning earlier that there's a strand of this in plato that would be where it'd be yeah and there's there's an antecedent in homer too so i think it's in book five where um

1:55:54 uh one of the warriors has um the mist that covers mortal's eyes is lifted and he can suddenly see which people which warriors on the battlefield are gods and which ones are men but otherwise our eyes hide that from us so our eyes don't allow us to see correctly but they make us blind to these differences and it's it's that paradoxical quality that i think is really uh that underlies the real veil of perception worry yeah and i see yeah that's yeah that's

1:56:26 really interesting i'm looking forward to this paper coming on glad you took it off the shelf actually yeah well we'll see okay well i noticed we're getting on in time i can't keep you forever and my son's getting home from from school here in a second so i wonder we've talked about a lot but i wonder if there's anything that you were um hoping would come up or expecting would come up that hasn't come up and the answer could be no because i know you have a lot but if you if like there's something you want to talk about i'd like to make sure no i i think we we covered quite quite a range um and certainly with regard to my

1:57:00 work i mean i think one thing i i will say this came up i was um i'll just mention it briefly um i'll try to be brief uh that when i when i was in china in november before the the virus and um i was challenged in beijing about you know what was the value of you know doing the history of philosophy here it seems like the the takeaway lessons that we could get from some of these some of these discussions could be stated very simply you could as it were

1:57:33 throw away the latter you know having ascended the ladder you kick it away you don't you don't really need it and um i think it's true that we can recover insights from the history or discover ones that we haven't really thought of and need to pay more attention to i mentioned that before that's the kind of um utilitarian justification that for example former colleague of mine rod chisholm used to use i mean he started every morning apparently uh reading 15 minutes of aquinas in latin just to warm

1:58:05 up you know and his view was you just raid the history of philosophy for good ideas and sometimes you find them sometimes you don't you know you you take whatever you can get um and i think there's something to that and i think there's something to what i described at the beginning in terms of this parallax this conceptual parallax of getting a different perspective on things from seeing it from a different horizon or different theoretical vantage point but i also think that there's something really valuable in

1:58:37 that historians of philosophy do that's actually essential to philosophy quite generally but non-historians don't always do as much of or are not as conscious of the issues methodologically and that's the extent to which you know in addition to analysis and logical argumentation in addition even to what i was just describing about metaphors and models and images um is the practice of interpretation yeah

1:59:10 so historians are primarily occupied i mean their starting point is always textual is how do we make sense of this text it it's puzzling it's problematic i can't reconcile this bit with that bit do i have the resources and the text to make sense of it is there any conjecture i can make that would that would make it not necessarily true i mean it's not davidson's principle of charity right at all it's it's rather can i just make it intelligible right can i make it coherent to myself that in a smart person at another time with maybe

1:59:43 different beliefs thought this was really pretty compelling and that i should consider it right that's that's the level of charity i'm at yeah and um historians of philosophy i think are really well practiced in seeing how something might just seem superficially obvious like an interpretation of reading might seem uh like the only one you could do but but when you're in groups or you're in seminars in the history of philosophy you suddenly realize that the text is much more open right than you realize and that there

2:00:15 are very subtle differences or emphases which allow you to read the very same text in very very disparate ways and one of the things that struck me while i was having this conversation in beijing was that um actually this is true about philosophy quite generally um that a lot of times your contemporaries that you're arguing with or disputing with are not people that you're in touch with and even when you can call them up or zoom with them or email them

2:00:48 those interactions don't necessarily shine more light on what they said and what's going on you know because they they don't always have the same kind of grasp of what they're doing that a third person does uh looking at it and it struck me that actually even with living you know the you could think well the his with the history of philosophy the problem or the advantage is that these people are dead and you can't talk to them but it struck me that actually it's the other way around that even with living people who you can talk with it's not

2:01:21 necessarily it's not necessarily going to get you you're not going to make the progress you need the insights that you need and what it what it made clear to me is a different reason why the history of philosophy is i think essential to the training of any philosopher which is that in reading and in talking with other philosophers and arguing with them an absolutely essential fundamental part of our toolkit is our ability to interpret and see different ways of interpreting what other people are saying

2:01:54 um not just again in davidson's sense of making it all come out true or as much of it as you can right but in the sense of just making it intelligible and that there are very different ways of taking very similar you know very similar formulations and understanding wildly different sorts of schemes and and so i think that one of the great things about training students in the history of philosophy who are not going to be historians is not only acquainting them with their a tradition which is responsible

2:02:26 for the problems that they've inherited and are dealing with but also for getting them uh how to learn sophisticated ways um you know illuminating ways of of reading other philosophers especially when you're handicapped by not being able to get in touch with them right forces you back on your own resources to imagine other points of view to see ways of defending another point of view to think about the ways of testing it or putting pressure on it and so forth

2:03:00 and that this is just a central philosophical activity that we use quite widely um in addition to very important analytical logical techniques um and imaginative techniques as well right so i just wanted to put in i couldn't agree more i mean i tell my students all the time it's really easy to tear things down it's a lot harder to say why would an intelligent person say something that i don't agree with right and trying to work your way into their point of view and say what this they thought was really important and yeah so

2:03:33 why how do you put it all together so that we make the most sense of them it's like the principle of honorable charity or something it's not like you want to make it true you want to give that you want to treat them as a reasoner that has certain exactly these that's right right right the charity is to is to see it as intelligible right to a smart person that the smart person would find yeah i couldn't agree with you more that's important for doing philosophy generally and for i'd say just being a citizen as well by the way in our

2:04:05 current climate but well isn't it isn't that true yes we've learned that lesson pretty well yeah exactly well on that note i want to thank you for joining me today victor um and uh i really enjoyed this conversation i learned a tremendous amount from your work and i hope that uh i mean that people engage with it and i'll put the links up like i said um and just hang out for a second i'll say bye off the air but thanks again i really appreciate it thanks so much i appreciate it okay we're done we're