Talking about Looks

Kathrin Glüer

doi:10.1007/s13164-017-0350-7

Abstract

In natural language, looks-talk is used in a variety of ways. I investigate three uses of ‘looks’ that have traditionally been distinguished – epistemic, comparative, and phenomenal ‘looks’ – and endorse and develop considerations in support of the view that these amount to polysemy. Focusing on the phenomenal use of ‘looks’, I then investigate connections between its semantics, the content of visual experience, and the metaphysics of looks. I argue that phenomenal ‘looks’ is not a propositional attitude operator: We do not use it to ascribe propositional attitudes to subjects, but to directly ascribe looks to objects, where looks are relational properties. However, I go on to argue that, given the way we use phenomenal ‘looks’, these relational properties are ultimately best understood as phenomenal relational properties, i.e. in terms of relations involving experiences. Along the way, I endorse Byrne’s argument against Jackson’s claim that phenomenal ‘looks F’ only takes predicates for colour, shape, and distance, and raise the issue of compositionality for the resulting view according to which phenomenal ‘looks F’ is context-dependent in a way that allows it to take a vast range of predicates. I conclude by arguing that these considerations concerning the natural language use of ‘looks’, and in particular its phenomenal use, are water on the mills of phenomenal intentionalism, a position in the philosophy of perception according to which experiences are propositional attitudes with phenomenal looks-contents.

Highlights

One morning in late summer, Alma looks out of the window of the cottage she and Martha have rented for their vacation
Despite all that has been said about the uses of ‘looks’, there still is a need, 1Just a few examples for illustration: Jackson (1977) uses claims about looks-language to support a sense datum theory, Chisholm (1957) to argue for adverbialism, Alston (2002) for the theory of appearing, Sellars (1963), Byrne (2009), and Brogaard (2013, 2015) for intentionalism, and Martin (2010) claims that there are no semantic arguments against identifying looks with basic sensible properties such as redness and roundness, thereby providing support for a form of anti-intentionalist relationalism
What about the phenomenal and the comparative use of ‘looks’, – can we argue for the difference between them amounting to polysemy? Brogaard looks at examples like

Summary

Introduction

One morning in late summer, Alma looks out of the window of the cottage she and Martha have rented for their vacation. Alma and Martha are using looks-language in a variety of ways; they talk about the looks of objects and how they compare, but they use ‘looks’ in their descriptions of the states of affairs that might or will obtain in the world around them Such lookslanguage is the main topic of this paper. Despite all that has been said about the uses of ‘looks’, there still is a need, 1Just a few examples for illustration: Jackson (1977) uses claims about looks-language to support a sense datum theory, Chisholm (1957) to argue for adverbialism, Alston (2002) for the theory of appearing, Sellars (1963), Byrne (2009), and Brogaard (2013, 2015) for intentionalism, and Martin (2010) claims that there are no semantic arguments against identifying looks with basic sensible properties such as redness and roundness, thereby providing support for a form of anti-intentionalist relationalism. I shall conclude that nothing in this paper prevents me from modelling looks-contents for experience on natural language phenomenal ‘looks’

The Uses of ‘Looks’