after Peirce’s invocation of the concept, “quale,” “qualia” and “quales” appear regularly in the literature of philosophy and psychology from the 1870s through the early twentieth century.15 What is striking about how the term is used during this
period is that while it is clearly used at least some of the time to refer to sensational experiences, more often, it is used to describe experiences that, today, we would find odd to think of in straightforward sensational or perceptual terms. Here is a list of how the term was used, roughly in descending order of commonality:
Feelings of pleasure and pain
there is much discussion of the quale of feeling, where “feeling” here refers to the experience of pleasure (approbation) or pain (disapprobation).16 this seems connected
to Peirce’s mention of the quale of a work of art or of a particular day: one strong element of such a quale would be how pleasing such a thing is. this sense of the term is sometimes referred to as the “emotional” quality of experience. examples of qualia being discussed in the context of feelings are numerous: Ward (1883), Whittaker (1890) and stanley (1892).
one early example of the use of quale in this sense, stout (1888) points to the fusion of sensations (as in the sound of a chord), and continues, “Purely sensuous pleasures and pains are explained on the same lines. only in their case the presen- tations between which fusion takes place are not separately discernible. they are merged in a single distinctionless quale, which defies all attempts to resolve it into its component parts” (489).
nichols (1892) also discusses qualia in the context of feelings of pleasure and pain. He does so in a revealing fashion, in that he explicitly distinguishes talk of senses from talk of qualia. His paper explores the question of whether pain should be a separate sense (on par with vision, hearing, etc.) or whether it should be considered a phenomenal aspect of one of the other senses. this latter view he terms the “doctrine
of qualia” (431). He thinks the then recent findings of goldsheider – that there is
a peripheral nerve system for pain that is separate from other cutaneous senses – is evidence that pain is a separate sense, not a quality of other senses: “thus pain sometimes stays while all the other senses go, and sometimes goes when the other senses stay, which surely looks as if it were not a quale inseparable from the other sense” (406).
Extensity
In addition to the context of pleasure and pain, the other main context for discussing qualia comes up in terms of the experience of space. for example, Hyslop (1891) makes use of the term in his critical examination of Helmholtz’s concept of “uncon- scious inference” as a means of explaining how the mind constructs its perception of the visual world; that is, how the mind comes to experience a three-dimensional
world as a result of the two-dimensional input to our retinas, on the one hand; and our tactile experience of the world, on the other. as he puts it, “I have desired to indicate the existence in vision of a quale distinct from differences of shade and colour, which may as well be called extension as not; because it is capable of being identified with a tactual quale of the same meaning, while the sensations proper are not so connected” (78–9).
further, the most famous discussion of qualia during this early period comes from William James. His two 1879 papers on the “spatial qualia” (1879a), (1879b) are the ancestors of his chapter “the Perception of space” in his 1890 Principles of
Psychology.17 (see also James [1887a, b].) Here is how James (1981 [1890]) describes
this phenomenon:
tHe feelIng of crude extensIty: In the sensations of hearing, touch, sight, and pain we are accustomed to distinguish from among the other elements the element of voluminousness. We call the reverberations of a thunderstorm more voluminous than the squeaking of a slate-pencil; the entrance into a warm bath gives our skin a more massive feeling than the prick of a pin; a little neuralgic pain, fine as a cobweb, in the face seems less extensive than the heavy soreness of a boil or the vast discomfort of a colic or a lumbago. (776)
Non-sensorial thought
yet another case is that of non-sensorial thought; that is, cognition that is not sensation-based in its phenomenology. for example, Woodworth (1906) describes a number of situations in which we have a distinct phenomenology in the absence of any particular sense-modality-specific experience:
It seems impossible to describe these facts without admitting the existence of other than sensorial contents of consciousness. I would suggest that in addition to sensorial elements, thought contains elements which are wholly irreducible to sensory terms. [. . .] there is a specific and unanalyzable conscious quale for every individual and general notion, for every judgment and supposition. these qualities recur in the same sense as red and other sensory qualities recur. (705–6)
shand (1898) covers very similar ground while discussing what he calls the “quale of thought,” concluding that it “defies analysis and remains absolutely unique” (500).18
Emotion
the phenomenal quality of emotion is yet another context for the early discussion of qualia, as found in Irons (1897b), who speaks of “the true emotional quale” (489) (see also Irons [1897a]). similarly, rogers (1904) concludes, “that the emotion is not
wholly identical with organic sensations, seems to be the conclusion toward which psychology is tending. to me it appears that there is a special quale, which cannot be reduced to anything more simple and elementary” (41).
Effort
a final context in which early philosophers discuss qualia involves the “sense of effort,” for example the phenomenal feeling of effort one experiences while trying to concentrate on a symphony or trying to solve a math problem (known as “moral” effort) or in trying to hold one’s hand in a flame (“muscular” effort). dewey (1897) wants to defend a “sensational” account of this phenomenon that reduces this phenomenal quality to sensory experience; that is, effort is explained in such terms as the feeling of holding one’s breath or furrowing one’s brow: “there are three distin- guishable views regarding the psychical quales experienced in cases of effort. [. . . one] view declines to accept the distinction made between moral and physical effort as a distinction of genesis, and holds that all sense of effort is sensationally (peripherally) determined” (43).
It isn’t easy to figure out a unified characterization of qualia that makes sense of all these different uses of the term (and, in all honesty, I have not mentioned other uses of which I cannot make sense). However, there are strains that flow through all of them. all are aspects of experienced phenomenology. they all recognize that not everything we experience is systematically correlated with our classic aristotelian five senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch – in a one-to-one fashion. some, such as the feeling of extensity or feelings of pleasure, are associated with more than one sensory modality. others, such as emotion or non-sensorial thought, do not seem to be associated with any sense whatsoever.
(Incidentally, this is part of why I argue that phenomenology is not a good guide for differentiating the senses from one another. When stout (1888: 489) observes that experiences of pleasure or pain “are merged in a single distinctionless quale, which defies all attempts to resolve it into its component parts” one worries about the utility of such qualia to separate out pleasures of different senses.)
strikingly, at several points in these early discussions, a “qualia account” is presented as in opposition to a “sensational account.” this points to one way of under- standing these odd qualia that aren’t associated with a single modality: Perhaps these early theorists thought of “qualia” as defining a catch-all or otherwise-non-definable category. In other words, membership in the qualia-category is defined by the inability to place a given experience within one of the other categories, which are defined in terms of the senses.19
Conclusion
With luck, this paper has fleshed out an historical development in the philosophy of perceptual psychology that has largely been ignored. Instead of the commonplace belief that the first philosophically sensible discussion of qualia starts with lewis,
instead, the historical picture presented here demonstrates that prior to lewis’s use of the term, there was another, related but different sense of the concept in the literature, exemplified most clearly in the work of Peirce.
the question of how to differentiate the sensory modalities is one (but probably not the only) philosophical issue where the differences in the meaning of qualia make a difference. because of the important philosophical work they do in grounding a foundationalist epistemology, lewis qualia are tightly coupled to the senses. on lewis’s account, qualia truly are the data of the senses. as such, goodman and more recently, austen clark, have been able to further develop the implications of a lewisian account of qualia to propose a means of differentiating the senses from one another, giving us an account of how to distinguish sight from smell from touch and so on. In fact, when the extant history of qualia only makes reference to lewis qualia, such an account seems inevitable.
but the existence of a rich, prior, alternative account of qualia – an account that does not relate qualia necessarily with sensation – removes the air of inevitability from qualia-based accounts of modality differentiation. Indeed, on this alternative account, qualia are often invoked precisely when attempts to understand experience in terms of sensation fail. at the very least, the alternative Peirce-qualia account emphasizes the importance of those elements of conscious experience that do not fall neatly under the heading of “sensory experience.”
as I discussed in the introduction, this concern with the differentiation of sensory modalities is merely my own bailiwick, and reflects my own entrée into this odd, pre-lewis history of the quale concept. However, I feel certain that this history will be of interest to others who are currently struggling over this central concept in the philosophy of psychology. my hope is that by pulling back the curtain on this unexplored history of ideas – if only to the tiny degree I have been able to here – others will be stimulated to explore it more fully and more clearly situate current debates over what lycan rightly calls “this unhappy word.”
Notes
1. the reference to “special introspectable character” comes from (grice 1989 [1962]), although to be fair, grice himself avoids reference to the term “qualia.” for some of the debate over the relationship between the senses and qualia, see dretske (2000) and lopes (2000). for my own initial foray into these issues, see keeley (2002).
2. there is some confusion in crane’s citation of the 1866 date here. the quoted passage is from Peirce’s
Collected Papers and is from his notes for a series of lectures in 1898. (I will quote the passage more
fully below.) However, according to the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Peirce did indeed first use the term in 1866; however, this is not that early passage. (again, I will consider this earlier passage below, as well.)
3. as we will see below, somewhat contrary to what crane says here, James does not use the term in the context of “sensation” per se, but only when discussing a particular instance of sensation, namely the perception of space (or “voluminousness” or “crude extensity”). further, in the fourth section, I will present some evidence that “quale” does play a significant role in Peirce’s philosophy of psychology. 4. later, goodman (1966: 189ff.) explicitly endorses this way of thinking about qualia.
5. It’s interesting to note that this sort of “inverted spectrum” situation – supposing that qualia in two different people might well be different, for all we know – and lewis’s talk of “lifting” a quale out of
“the network of its relations” mirrors closely what Peirce wrote about the concept exactly a century earlier (see, e.g., Peirce 1982 [1866]: 472).
6. although goodman makes it clear that his notion of qualia is taken from lewis, he notes that he draws the sensory modality argument from carnap’s 1928 discussion of “sense classes” in the Aufbau (§§ 85, 114, 115).
7. see my (2002: 15–16) for a discussion and critique of this line of argument.
8. Perhaps it is also worth noting that this is the second definition of “quale” given in the OED; the first being to “torment, torture” with references to “quale-house, house of torture” and “quale-sithe, death from pestilence.” there’s a joke in here somewhere.
9. the original text reads “world.” I believe this is in error.
10. further, the choice of a Latin term in translating a greek passage for an english-speaking audience is even more striking.
11. neither does lewis credit anybody else with using the term when he makes use of it. goodman (1966: 130n3) credits lewis (1929).
12. the numbering system refers to the once canonical eight-volume Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce (Peirce 1931–58), in this case, paragraph 222 of volume 6. this edition is slowly being super-
seded by the much more thorough Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, from which I have been quoting above. the chronological edition has only made it to 1890, to date, so after this date we must fall back on the Collected Papers.
13. my guess, for the Peirce scholars out there, is that though it is not explicit in Peirce’s work, the sense of quale at play in this passage is a representative of “firstness” in his tripartite metaphysics. compare what rosensohn (rosensohn 1974: 80–1) says about the place of experiential qualities within Peirce’s metaphysical system. consider also this from Peirce, which although it does not explicitly mention qualia, seems to be on the same track: “What the world was to adam on the day he opened his eyes, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own existence – that is first . . . fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent. only, remember that every description of it must be false to it” (1.357).
14. In a passage I didn’t quote before, Peirce (1982 [1866]) speaks of beauty in the same way: “when we hear a sonata of beethoven’s the predicate of beautiful is affixed to it as a single representation of the complicated phenomena presented to the ear. the beauty does not belong to each note or chord but to the whole” (472).
15. “Quale” is consistently used as the singular form of the term. It appears in the plural as either “qualia” or “quales” at roughly an equal rate.
16. nichols (1892) well captures the sense of the term at play in these discussions:
from Plato and aristotle down through descartes, leibnitz, Hobbes, sulzer, kant, Herbart, bain, spencer, dumont, and allen – down to the latest articles of mr. marshall in Mind, the idea, at base, has ever been the same: the experience, the judgment, the attainment of a perfect or imperfect life; the perfect or imperfect exercise of a faculty; the furtherance or hindrance of some activity; the rise or fall of some vital function, force, or energy. everywhere pleasure and pain have been looked upon as complementary terms of a single phenomenon, and as the very essence of expression of the rise and fall of our inmost existence. (403)
17. note a few unrelated things: first, the 1879a paper is the earliest reference to be found in the Jstor (“Journal storage”) catalogue of archived philosophy journal publications (as of June 2007). However, it should be taken as a cautionary note that the other (1879b) paper is not to be found in Jstor, because the journal in which it appears is not included in that archive. finally, the chapter on space perception in James’ Principles is the only place in that entire, voluminous work where the term “quale” and its cognates makes an appearance, including those chapters discussing other aspects of sensory perception.
18. I can’t pass without noting that this view – that there exists a unique experience of non-sensorial thought – has recently been rediscovered. see Pitt’s (2004) “the Phenomenology of cognition or
What Is It Like To Think That P?”
Acknowledgements
like too many of my papers, this one has had a long gestation period – a fact that leaves me with a lot of folks to thank. an early version, under the title “the Hunt for the Wily Quale,” was presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the society for Philosophy and Psychology at Wake forest university, where bill lycan presented a helpful commentary. the same paper was presented as an invited talk at the claremont graduate university (thanks to James griffith), where Peter ross gave his view of things. my philosophical colleagues at the claremont colleges also helped shape my early thoughts about the history of qualia. george graham gave me valuable feedback at a crucial point in this paper’s development. both Hugh clapin and chuck young gave me valuable feedback at significant points in the paper’s development.
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