Relationalism, Berkeley’s Puzzle, and Phenomenological Externalism

Relationalism, also called ‘the Relational View’, is a theory of perceptual experience which sees at least a central core of such experience as consisting in a non-representational relation between subjects and features of their environment—a relation that is also seen as at least analogous to Russellian acquaintance. In addition to phenomenological support, relationalism is according to one of its major proponents John Campbell needed to solve what he calls ‘Berkeley’s puzzle’: how it can be that we can gain a conception of objects as mind-independent from sensory experience. I examine Campbell’s arguments for this claim and suggest they fail to convince insofar as it is unclear that experience is necessary to acquire a conception of mind-independent objects. I close by showing how phenomenological externalism can do justice to our conflicting intuitions regarding Berkeley’s puzzle.

Natural Acquaintance

Notwithstanding its phenomenological appeal, physicalists have tended to shun the notion that we are ‘acquainted’ with our mental states in consciousness, due to the fact that the acquaintance relation seems mysterious, irreducible, and consequently unnatural. I propose a model of conscious experience based on the idea of ‘mental quotation’, and argue that this captures what we want from acquaintance but without any threat to naturalism. More generally the chapter embodies a complaint that reductionists seem unable to look past the representation relation to do the implementing of consciousness, and a call for theorists to investigate other relations to model our connection to our conscious states, like the constitution/part-whole relationship. This mundane relation has what it takes to give us natural acquaintance with our conscious-mental states.

Visual Experience, Revelation, and the Three Rs

We specify the conscious character of vision by appeal to the way things look to the subject. An experience in which there looks to be an F before her is also a source of knowledge of what it is to be F. I argue that these commitments are incompatible with Resemblance and Representational accounts and motivate a Relational account of the nature of visual experience.

Acquaintance in an Experience of Perception-cum-Action

In everyday perception, we experience a direct acquaintance with things in our surroundings, say, as I see this tennis ball before me. In everyday action, we also experience a direct acquaintance with things, as I grasp and pick up and hit this ball. Moreover, perception and action form a unified phenomenal intentional experience, as I consciously see-and-grasp-and-hit this particular ball. An experience of seeing-and-acting with regard to a particular object is a form of direct acquaintance, a paradigm of what Husserl called ‘intuition’. The phenomenology of perception-cum-action leads into the ontology of direct acquaintance. The structure of this form of embodied intentional experience cuts between internalist and externalist models of perception (and volition in action), clarifies embodiment and activity, and obviates disjunctivist models of perception, while avoiding reducing consciousness in acquaintance to a physical transmission of physical information, say, between my brain, my body, and this ball.

Introduction

That there is a distinctively philosophical usage of the term ‘acquaintance’ is, of course, due primarily to the influence of Bertrand Russell and in particular to the distinction he famously drew between ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ and ‘knowledge by description’. These phrases soon became part of the philosophical lexicon. For example, the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society twice featured symposia on the question ‘Is there knowledge by acquaintance?’, first in 1919...

Objectual Knowledge

It is commonly assumed that besides knowledge of facts or truths, there is also knowledge of things—for example, we say that we know people or know places. We could call this ‘objectual knowledge’. In this chapter, I raise doubts about the idea that there is a sui generis objectual knowledge that is distinct from knowledge of truths.

Acquaintance as Grounded in Joint Attention

One great opposition in philosophy of language has been between those who take the shared language as fundamental to human cognition and those who argue that all human cognitive capacities, including knowledge of language, are grounded in individualistic cognitions. Those who took the primacy of the shared language seriously, such as Whorf and Wittgenstein, were resistant to the idea of reference to mind-independent objects, and statements being made true or false by a mind-independent world. This chapter sketches out a way of reinstating the primacy of the shared language that gives full weight to the role of reference and truth. Accepting that an understanding of language has a fundamentally social grounding means that we do not regard language as grounded in individualistic cognitions, but also gives full place to the idea that knowledge of reference is basic to language mastery.

Dreaming, Phenomenal Character, and Acquaintance

Dreams are often defined as sleeping experiences with phenomenal character similar to perceptions of the real world. Hence they pose a prima facie challenge to accounts of phenomenal character in terms of acquaintance relations. One response is disjunctivist: to give a different account of their phenomenal character from that of successful perceivings. I argue that, given the alleged frequency of dreaming on the standard model, this disjunctivist approach weakens the explanatory value of the acquaintance account of the phenomenal character of successful perceivings. Another response is to follow Malcolm and Dennett in denying that dreaming has phenomenal character at all. I present a cultural-social model of dreams and argue that we lack theory-neutral evidence of the phenomenal character of dreams and thus it is legitimate to choose between theories of dreaming on the basis of their fit with our best theory of the phenomenal character of successful perceivings, namely acquaintance.

Acquaintance Is Consciousness and Consciousness Is Acquaintance

In this chapter I survey the various roles that acquaintance might play in the philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, and I then go on to explore the prospects for a naturalistic account of acquaintance to fill these roles. I will continue by arguing that while some roles can be filled by a naturalistic theory, others cannot. Finally, I will briefly present a non-naturalistic theory, according to which consciousness just is the relation of acquaintance, and show both how it accomplishes what a naturalistic theory could not but also how it cannot accomplish everything a naturalistic theory can.

Acquaintance, Conceptual Capacities, and Attention

I distinguish two reactions to Russell’s theory of acquaintance, specifically to its claim that perceptual awareness is simpler than and independent of conceptual thought and yet a source of propositional knowledge. The conceptualist response, championed inter alia by John McDowell, argues perception can be a source of knowledge only if conceptual capacities are in play in perception. The relationist response, championed inter alia by John Campbell, endorses Russell’s view that perceptual awareness is non-propositional and even non-representational, yet holds it is a relation to physical objects not sense-data. I here point up an underappreciated convergence between McDowell’s recast, non-propositionalist conceptualism and Campbell’s attention-centric relationism; I show how the former can be defended drawing inter alia on some central claims in the latter.