Consciousness, Acquaintance and Demonstrative Thought

Abstract

ISuppose you are a blindsighted subject and an experimenter sitting opposite you says of an object in your functionally blind field 'that peach looks delicious'. Unless you move your head to encompass the object within your normal field of vision you will not know which object she is talking about. Suppose now she reverts to the strategy used by neurophsychologists who work with blindsighted subjects and simply tells you that there is an object there and asks you either to reach for it or guess its shape, colour and so forth. If you are one of the well-trained blindsighted subjects who have been worked over for many years by psychologists you may well be able to do so, while denying you have any visual experience of the object and insisting you are only guessing. And, in concurrence with the existential formulation the experimenter now uses, instead of the demonstrative, it is natural to think that your singular reference, based on your perceptual input, is descriptive, as in 'the object she maintains is there' or 'the object I am guessing about' or 'the object in my blind field', etc. A compelling thought now is that there is some kind of explanatory link between the absence of consciousness in the blindsighted case, and our natural appeal to descriptions and quantifiers to explain the exchange between the experimenter and the subject. This is one way in which Bill Brewer, in Perception and Reason, highlights the epistemological role we think conscious experience has, here, in providing us with direct knowledge of the referents of the demonstratives we use in perception-based judgements. The compellingness of the intuition about the crucial epistemological role of consciousness here is further strengthened when we bring into account Strawson's massive duplication argument. The argument, as developed forcefully by Brewer, shows that the permanent possibility of massive duplication of one portion of the universe in another means that our reference to particular objects cannot be secured by general descriptions alone. Ultimately, our reference to particular objects can only be secured by ways of thinking the charac