Travis’s fourth and final argument against representationalism addresses the second of the above questions concerning the relation between the role of p- representation and perceptual states like seeing, hearing, tasting, and so on. The
argument falls into two distinct parts. The first part aims to show that if experience involved p-representation, then this representation must be the sole source of perceptual information available to the subject. That is, in the case of veridical perception, representation should not be an unnecessary ‘wheel idling’ (Travis 2004: 86). The second part of the argument concludes that any
awareness of an object in virtue of p-representation would at best be mediate
awareness. Such awareness is comparable to testimony, and is constituted by the representation of content plus the satisfaction of ‘certain quite substantial contingencies’ (ibid. 89), such as believing the content to be true, the obtaining of the relevant correctness conditions, the reliability of the source, and so on.
However, many representationalists think that perception delivers unmediated
awareness. Seeing the pig constitutes a form of awareness of the pig that being
told there is a pig does not — at least not until the various contingent conditions are satisfied, and perhaps not even then. What remains mysterious is how a state (i.e. p-representation) one can be in without the presence of its intentional
objects — in hallucinations, for example — can play an explanatory role in the
awareness of those objects in the ‘good’ case. Rather, whatever is doing the explanatory work must be something over and above p-representation, thereby rendering its content if not unnecessary then at least lacking in explanatory value.
The first part of this argument can be summarised as follows:
U1! P-representation is either (a) a separate source of perceptual
information to seeing30 or (b) constitutes one’s perceptual
awareness.
U2 If p-representation were a separate source of perceptual
awareness to seeing, then it would be unnecessary for the
awareness of objects simpliciter.
U3 We have no phenomenological evidence for the existence of
multiple sources of perceptual information in visual experience.
U4! P-representation and seeing are not separate sources of
perceptual information.
Travis’s rejects the ‘two-source’ model of perceptual awareness on the basis that if p-representation and seeing were separate sources of information, the latter of which was sufficient for perceptual awareness, then p-representation would be effectively redundant (U2). (The relevant notion of ‘source’ here is proximal, not distal, and so is more akin to an informational conduit than a causal origin.) Therefore p-representation and seeing are not separate sources of perceptual information (U3), and so p-representation must be constitutive of the perceptual awareness of objects, as per U1(b).
Having argued for a ‘one-source’ model of perceptual awareness, Travis aims to establish that p-representation can only ever furnish us with ‘mediated’, as opposed to ‘unmediated’, awareness of objects. He argues this on the basis of the following principle or test (Travis 2004: 89):
As a rule, awareness of something else plus satisfaction of surrounding conditions cannot add up to that awareness of [the presence of o] which we have in seeing [o] (to be there) — in my terms, unmediated awareness. Or, more exactly, if X is something there might be even without Y, then awareness of X (and whatever accompanies it per se in a particular case) cannot qualify as unmediated awareness of Y — the sort one might have in seeing Y.
In familiar forms of representation, such as testimony, it may be represented to
the subject that X. However, since such representations can occur even though
not-X — e.g. in the case of false testimony — such representation cannot constitute unmediated awareness due to the presence of a representational intermediary, in this case a report. According to Travis, what goes for testimony goes for perception since, as we have seen, the representationalist also allows that representational content may be present without its corresponding intentional objects. Thus, awareness of a particular content cannot constitute unmediated awareness of an object since the same state can occur in the absence of that object.
We can formalise the second part of the argument as follows:
U5! Subjectively indistinguishable veridical and non-veridical
perceptual experiences share a common representational content. (Common Content)
U6 In non-veridical experience, p-representation cannot yield
unmediated awareness of intentional objects, since there may be no such objects.
U7 The same representational content cannot explain the
unmediated awareness of objects in some cases, but not in others.
U8! P-representational content cannot yield unmediated awareness of
an object in veridical perception. (From U5, U6 and U7)
This yields a kind of reverse argument from illusion that combines representationalist’s account of illusion (U5) with a ‘base case’ (U6) and ‘generalising’ or ‘spreading step’ (U7) to force the conclusion that p- representational content cannot yield the unmediated awareness of objects (U8) even in the ‘good’ case (cf. Snowdon op. cit.). More schematically, if a given representational content does not constitute unmediated awareness in non- veridical experience, then it cannot constitute unmediated awareness in veridical
perception either.31 Since many representationalists hold that such
representations, or their constituent elements, can also occur in the absence of
that which they represent — indeed, this is often supposed to be one of the
strengths of representationalism — then the argument from unmediated
awareness, if successful, would render perceptual awareness mediate in a similar way to testimony.
It is important to note that the term ‘mediated awareness’ does not imply that one is aware of the intermediary; i.e. it is not indirect or secondary epistemic perception in Dretske’s sense (1969: 79). Rather, the claim is that this is not the kind of awareness that we take ourselves to have in perceptual experience. Perceptual awareness cannot, according to the present view, be factorized into p-representation plus the satisfaction of some additional surrounding conditions such as taking something to be the case, factivity, reliability, entitlement, and so on (Travis 2004: 89). This claim has important
epistemological consequences since if to see x is to have unmediated awareness
of x or to have one’s cognitive responses shaped by x’s presence, then ‘no
substantial entitlement is needed … to take there to be [x]’ (Travis 2004: 90).
Unmediated awareness of objects is therefore uniquely suited to yielding
knowledge of the world in a way that mediate, that is to say representational,
awareness is not — at least not without the satisfaction of a host of as-yet-
unspecified, and quite possibly unspecifiable, further conditions.
The argument from unmediated awareness is completed by the following premises:
U9! Visual experience (seeing) is a source of information that yields
unmediated awareness of objects.
U10! Visual experience is not p-representation. (From U4, U8 and U9)
In summary, and generalising to cover other sense modalities, if p-representation were our sole source of perceptual information but cannot deliver unmediated awareness of objects, then perceptual experience cannot be p-representational.
As with the historical argument from illusion (2.3.1), Travis’s argument from unmediated awareness may be challenged at several key points. Why, for example, should the representationalist accept that the same p-representational content cannot yield unmediated awareness in some cases and not in others (U7)? On the face of it, this principle seems intuitive, but if p-representation were ‘narrow’ in the sense of being internally individuated, whilst the mental state of awareness were ‘wide’ or externally individuated, then the same narrow content could be present in both cases without ruling out that it could also feature in the explanation of unmediated awareness in the veridical, but not the non-veridical case. Similarly at the level of content, some but not all representational elements may be common between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cases, 31 Note that the relevant content may be only part of the full p-representation, thus leaving room for the kind of response to the argument discussed in 5.3.2.
generating a form of content disjunctivism or indexicality. This is perfectly
consistent with Common Content and would explain the immediate awareness
of objects in terms of those representational elements or contents that are present in the ‘good’ case, but not the ‘bad’.
Such responses, however, suggest there must be more to unmediated awareness than perceptually experiencing an appropriately caused p- representation of an object. This ‘something more’ is arguably precisely the relation between subject and object that anti-representationalists claim is fundamental to perceptual experience, and which appears to be omitted from the representationalist model. This in turn suggests that representationalism gives at best a partial characterisation of perceptual experience with much of the explanatory work being done by the relational element. This suggestion is taken up further in chapters 6 and 7, which explore the possibility that representationalism and relationalism may in some sense be two sides of the same coin.