The qualification at the end of the above formulation of Recognisability is
intended to capture the need for the p-representational contents to be
recognisable as contents of experience, and not, for example, as the contents of
beliefs or actions. This is important because whilst it is widely accepted that perceptual beliefs, judgements and actions have intentional content, this cannot in itself be taken to prove the existence of p-representation. Provided that an
alternative explanation of the relevant phenomenon — namely, perceptual
experience — is available, then representation is just one of many several
possible explanations, each of which is compatible with the existence of the contents of belief and action. Moreover, if the notion of p-representation is itself incoherent, as Travis argues, then there can be no such representations. It is therefore necessary for p-representational contents to be attributable directly to experience, and not simply to beliefs or judgements, which are traditionally thought of as being ‘downstream’ of experience. Consequently, cognitive access to the intentional content of perceptual belief or action is not sufficient to meet
Recognisability. Similarly, a subject who is connected to a brain-scanner, the output of which is interpreted by a machine or team of scientists that informs the subject of the ‘contents’ of their experience would fail to meet the relevant
condition. Rather, it must be apparent to the subject — perhaps on the basis of
reflection or via perceptual phenomenology — what the content of their
experience is. I will talk of such content as being available to or accessible by the
subject.
One way in which p-representational contents may be available to a subject is through introspection, or reflective awareness, of their own mental states. That is, in reflecting upon their experience, the subject may be able to tell that it represents, for example, that there is a lime in the fruit basket. For this to count as evidence of the content of experience, rather than of belief, such content should exhibit a degree of independence from the subject’s beliefs. If they do not believe there is a lime in the fruit basket, for example, since they bought only
lemons, then experience must still recognisably represent there to be a lime —
perhaps due to some trick of the light — in spite of their inclination to believe
otherwise. Similarly, the lines of the Müller-Lyer illusion continue to look
different lengths even to subjects who know them to be otherwise — because
they have measured them, for example — quite independently of the subject’s
beliefs. Finally, there must be some specific way that experience represents the world as being in order for it to qualify as p-representation. Contents that are equivocal about what is represented, or that merely reflect what the subject is inclined to judge under those circumstances, do not constitute evidence of p- representation.
The above considerations suggest a stronger interpretation of
Recognisability based upon the subject’s ability to gain knowledge of the
content of their experience as follows. Call this Knowability:
Knowability: perceptual subjects must be capable of coming to know the representational content of any given p-representation solely in virtue of having that very experience.
As with Recognisability, Knowability does not require that subjects routinely
know or are capable of formulating the accuracy conditions for each individual experience. Rather, it suffices that they are in principle capable of knowing how any given experience represents the world as being. This renders the resulting contents cognitively available or accessible to the subject as part of their overall mental economy, and so capable of playing a role in motivating action or belief.
Nevertheless, Knowability might be thought to be too strong a condition upon
p-representation for two reasons. First, such knowledge may be tacit or implicit, rather than explicitly held by the subject. Second, this may require the subject to employ other capacities, such as conceptual competencies or draw upon other background knowledge, and so not be ‘solely in virtue of having that very experience’.
In relation to the first point, Travis’s account of Recognisability does not
require subjects to know the content of their experiences in any explicit sense.
Rather they should be ‘able to appreciate the experience as representing [what it] does’ and to ‘recognize, where needed, of particular ways things may or may not be, whether that is what the experience represented to [them] as so’ (Travis
2004: 62). This suggests a weaker interpretation of Recognisability according to
which the subject need only possess a tacit or implicit grasp of what it would take for their experience to be veridical. That is, they would recognise upon further inspection, for example, whether the experience was veridical or not
based upon their interactions and expectations of the world.3 Such an
understanding may be reflected in thought and action by guiding subjects’ actions and judgements according to what is represented. We can therefore
formulate a weaker condition than Knowability as follows:
Recognisability′: perceptual subjects must be capable of grasping what it would take for the content of any given p-representation to be accurate or veridical solely in virtue of having that very experience.
Note that even on this weaker formulation, it must still be possible for a suitably self-aware and conceptually sophisticated subject to consciously recognise that experience is representational as such. If this were not the case, then the relevant representations would be opaque to reflective awareness 3 This counterfactual claim is intended to apply both to subjects who are actually capable of such investigation and those who are not.
(though not, perhaps, to empirical or scientific investigation; cf. 5.2.4). Not all
perceptual subjects who satisfy Recognisability′, however, need possess such
reflective self-awareness.
In relation to the second of the above points, Looks-indexing characterised
the recognisability of perceptual content in terms of how, according to the
relevant experience, things perceptually seem — or look in the case of vision — to
the subject. In this case, the relevant contents were recognisable solely in virtue of experience, since to have that experience was just to be aware of things
looking some particular way. Having rejected Looks-indexing, however, we
must now consider how else a subject might understand or grasp what is represented to them. Plausibly, this may involve the operation of various cognitive capacities, including conceptual capacities or other forms of
background knowledge — a knowledge of appearances, for example (6.4.2).
Whether such recognition is solely in virtue of experience will depend upon the nature of the particular capacities or knowledge involved, and whether this is taken to be built into experience or external to it.
In the case of background knowledge, we can rule out the use of inference or deductive reasoning, since p-representation is intended to capture how
experience represents the world as being, and not what can be concluded or deduced on the basis of it. However, to avoid ruling out the non-inferential
application of the relevant capacities, we can further weaken Recognisability′ as
follows:
Recognisability″: perceptual subjects must be capable of grasping what it would take for the content of any given p-representation to be accurate or veridical solely in virtue of having that very experience plus the non-inferential operation of perceptual capacities and/or tacit knowledge of appearances.
This formulation of Recognisability retains the spirit of Travis’s requirement
that the relevant recognition be perceptual, and not simply a matter of reasoning or deduction, whilst not unnecessarily limiting the forms that such recognition might take.