Chapter 7 - Phenomenal Qualities and Intermodal Perception

Abstract

This chapter describes how mental states have phenomenal qualities, focusing on recent advances in developmental psychology and reviewing their consequence for traditional empiricism. The representational content of a perceptual state is a function of the particular phenomenal qualities and their organization in the perceptual field. Different qualities, or a different organization of qualities, produce a different representational content. It follows that the representational content of one's perceptual state supervenes on the phenomenal qualities of that state. Since phenomenal qualities and nothing else determine representational content, there can be no change in representation without a change in phenomenal qualities but not vice versa. One has access-consciousness when the content of a mental state is available for certain kinds of cognitive activity or action—phenomenal-consciousness refers to the feel of experience. The second option involves rejecting the view that phenomenal qualities have representational content. Intermodal perception is a set of phenomena that arise as a result of the fact that some properties of objects can be perceived by more than one sensory modality. Two well known findings in the domain of intermodal perception and action are: (1) visual-tactile recognition: Molyneux's task, and (2) imitation.