Phenomenal Externalism

Abstract

Phenomenal externalism, or the externalist version of representationism, is the view that the phenomenal character of experience—how the world seems to you—is exhausted by the intentional content of experience—how your experience represents the world. In the 1970’s, Hilary Putnam argued for externalism about meaning: what a person means by a word is in part dependent on her external environment, such that molecular duplicates whose nervous systems are in the exact same states can nonetheless mean different things by the same word, just by virtue of a difference in their environmental conditions. The lesson drawn by externalists is that meaning ain’t in the head, since it can change without any change in the brain. The phenomenal externalist wishes to say something similar about experience—it is in part dependent on the environment, such that molecular duplicates in the same states can nonetheless have different experiences, just by virtue of a difference in their environmental conditions. Phenomenolgy ain’t in the head either, phenomenal externalists maintain, and can also change without any changes in the brain. Some philosophers find this view attractive since it obviates various traditional problems with locating phenomenology in the head. However, there have also been serious objections to the view. Holliday reviews Ned Block’s famous “Inverted Earth” objection to phenomenal externalism, considers several recent replies to the objection by Michael Tye and Fred Dretske and then makes the case that these replies fail when we consider an empirical, psychological phenomenon known as cross-modal matching. Indeed, the replies of Tye and Dretske, which try to negotiate both Inverted Earth and another infamous thought-experiment involving “Swampman,” threaten to render the phenomenal character of experience epiphenomenal—i.e., causally impotent—which seems to undermine the point of providing an externalist representationist theory of it.