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Abstract

Mills raises three main objections. The first objection has to do with the way I describe the phenomenal features of experience. The second challenges my claim that cautious introspection is a reliable source of information about the phenomenal features of our own mental lives. The third is that my claims about introspective access presuppose an ad hoc restriction to the human case.1 In order to have a precise way to talk about the phenomenal qualities of various possible experiences, I defined an ‘experience as of X’ as an experience with the phenomenal quality that is distinctive of the experiences that normal human beings normally have when they perceive X. There are two problems with this definition. First, it fails to capture what I actually had in mind. By the stated definition, an experience as of a square-shaped object is one that has the phenomenal quality distinctive of ordinary human perceptions of square-shaped objects. But, obviously, there is no such quality: any phenomenal quality that ordinary human perceptions of square-shaped objects share is also a quality of various other experiences, such as dreams of square-shaped objects, and waking perceptions of rectangular objects viewed from certain angles.