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Normality So what is the difference between the “innocuous” inverted spectrum case, the one Wittgenstein regards as at least coherent, and the “dangerous” case, the one that he rejects? One difference is that the innocuous case occurs suddenly and “under peculiar circumstances:” the subject agrees that fire and the sky now “look queer”; whereas in the dangerous case “it may always happen”, even not under peculiar circumstances. Another difference is that the innocuous case is behaviorally different because the subject says, e.g. coal looks cool colored, whereas what Wittgenstein is suggesting in the dangerous case is an inverted person who is not behaviorally different. I would guess that the82 / Ned Block behavioral indetectability of the dangerous inversion was extremely important to Wittgenstein’s rejection of it. (This comes out in the second quote from Wittgenstein together with the passage in footnote 10.) However, there is another difference that does not depend on behavioral indetectability, and this difference is the one I am going to focus on here. I will argue that the dangerous scenario can be used to argue for qualia even if it is behaviorally detectable. Qualia, you will recall, are features of experience that are not expressible in ordinary language, including terms for properties of objects. One cannot express what red things look like colorwise in normal circumstances using color terms as in “looks red”, since things that look the way red things look to me(innormalcircumstances) may look to youthewaygreenthings look tome. So among qualia are ways things can look red. Something might look red to two people in different ways. And I think a crucial difference between the innocuous and dangerous cases that is relevant to qualia, is whether normal people (or one normal person at different times) in normal circumstances can be said to be color inverted or shifted with respect to one another. In the innocuous case, the color inverted person is abnormal. But if “one section of mankind has one sensation of red and another section another,” (Wittgenstein, 1958, Section 272, p. 95) then it would seem that normal people can have inverted color experience with respect to one another, and that is enough to produce a “very serious situation.”16 Here is why. It is incoherent to suppose that there are normal people in normal viewing circumstances for whom red things look green. To see this, suppose you are one of those putatively normal people for whom red things always look green. Suppose that you and I agree that there is a difference between us in ways that things look color-wise, and that the difference can be described by the locution “Things we agree are red look to you the way things we agree are green look to me.” I say to you that whereas red things look red to me, red things look green to you. You can object to the idea that red things look green to you. You can reply Who says that red things look green to me? Why are you the one for whom red things look red? I can with equal justification say that red things look red to me and green to you! If we are bothnormal, you have as good a case as I do. Since we are both normal, the right response is that neither you nor I have a superior claim to be the one for whom red things look red and green things look green. The situation is relevantly symmetrical. What we should say instead is that the way red things look to me is the same as the way green things look to you, and in allowing that there are ways things look that cannot be expressed in terms of “looking red” or “looking green” or any phrase of the form “looking F” where F is a color name, we step into the realm of qualia. (Given what I mean by ‘qualia’, this is definitional.)Wittgenstein and Qualia / 83 Using the familiar “what is like” terminology (Farrell, 1950; Nagel, 1974), the point is that if we acknowledge the existence of an innocuous inverted spectrum scenario, we can say that green is what it is like for the abnormal person to see red, whereas for the normal person, red is what it is like to see red. So the innocuous scenario does not require us to suppose that there are color experiences that cannot be expressed in terms of properties of things. However, if we allow the existence of a dangerous scenario, in which normal perceivers are inverted with respect to one another, we cannot say of either of them that green is what it is like to see red. If we acknowledge the existence of an inverted spectrum in this sense, we have to agree that no color name expresses what it is like for either one of the inverted people to see red. (Whether the existence of a dangerous scenario is required for qualia or whether its possibility will do will be taken up later.) I am not saying that what it is like for them to see red cannot be referred to in English. For example, we can refer to it by saying “What it is like for that person to see red”. What we cannot find is a color name ‘F’, such that what it is like for one of these people to see red can be expressed in the form “looking F”, and in that sense we can say that the experiential property is an ineffable quale. I am also not denying that Wittgenstein was concerned with the behavioral indistinguishability of the persons in the dangerous inverted spectrum case. If there could be an inverted but behaviorally indistinguishable pair of people, then it is hard to see how the difference between them could be relevant to any everyday uses of terms. My point is rather that an inverted pair both members of which are normal is problematic for Wittgenstein even if they are not behaviorally indistinguishable. Sydney Shoemaker (Shoemaker, 1982) distinguishes between intentional and qualitative similarity. If something looks red to you and me, then our experiences are thereby intentionally similar, but if your spectrum is inverted relative to mine, our experiences are thereby qualitatively dissimilar. (Although I have not yet argued for the possibility of the dangerous kind of inversion, I will assume it here to get the conceptual groundwork in place.) If something looks red both to you and to me, our experiences thereby have a shared intentional content, but if our spectra are inverted withrespect to one another, and if you are looking at a red thing and I am looking at a green thing, our experiences have a shared qualitative content. Looking red is an intentional content of color experience, not a qualitative content. For both members of the inverted pair, red things look red and green things look green. Color language in application both to the outer and the inner is keyed to intentional contents of experience (Block, 1990). States that have qualitative contents are just qualia, and it is the existence of qualitative contents that pose the challenge to expressibility in language. ItmayseemfromwhatIhavesaidsofarthattheissueofqualiaistheissueof whether the phenomenal character of experience goes beyond its representational content, that is, the issue of representationalism, or representationism as I call it (Block, 1990, 2003). But that is not the case, as can be seen by a brief84 / Ned Block consideration of a view held by Shoemaker (1994a; 1994b) and Michael Thau (2002). In Shoemaker’s version, the view is that when one looks at a ripe tomato, one’s experience represents the tomato as having two distinct kinds of colorrelevant properties, as being red and as having a certain “phenomenal property”. If your spectrum is inverted withrespect to mine, and we are looking at different items with complementary colors (e.g. you a red thing, me a green thing), our experiences represent those items as having the same phenomenal property and as having different colors. These phenomenal properties are definable in terms of qualia. As far as what I have said so far is concerned, one might think of them as qualia projected onto objects—but Shoemaker does not think of them that way, since he holds they are causally efficacious, indeed defined in terms of their production of qualia. So Shoemaker is a kind of representationist, and that allows one to see that one can be both a representationist and a believer in qualia. On Shoemaker’s view, color experience has two kinds of representational contents. One of them is what I have been and will be calling intentional contents, namely color-representing representational contents, contents that represent something as, e.g. red. But the other kind of representational content (the kind that represents phenomenal properties) is not expressible in public language. The issue of qualia is not the issue of whether the mental properties of experience can be fully captured in terms of what is represented by experience, since it may be that what is represented by experience cannot always be fully captured in public language. We could call the principle that normal perceivers in normal circumstances see red things as red, and thus that public language attributions of color experience express intentional contents of experience rather than qualitative contents the Principle of Normality.17 Gottlob Frege (Frege, 1884/1953) held a somewhat similar view (quoted in Byrne, 2006): The word ‘white’ ordinarily makes us think of a certain sensation, which is, of course, entirely subjective; but even in ordinary everyday speech, it often bears, I think, an objective sense. When we call snow white, we mean to refer to an objective quality which we recognize, in ordinary daylight, by a certain sensation. If the snow is being seen in a coloured light, we take that into account in our judgement and say, for instance, ‘It appears red at present, but it is white.’ Even a colour-blind man can speak of red and green, in spite of the fact that he does not distinguish between these colors in his sensations; he recognizes the distinction by the fact that others make it, or perhaps by making a physical experiment. Often, therefore, a colour word does not signify our subjective sensation, which we cannot know to agree with anyone else’s (for obviously calling things by the same name does not guarantee as much), but rather an objective quality. (§26) And, although my interpretation is not standard, one can see Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box passage as compatible with a similar view.18 The idea would be that the thing in the box—a quale—is irrelevant to the language game, whichWittgenstein and Qualia / 85 involves only what I am calling intentional contents (that is, color-representing contents). But qualia can exist and be important for some purposes even if the language game that Wittgenstein has in mind has no need of them. In a comment on a version of this paper at Hilary Putnam’s 80th birthday conference, Pierre Jacob noted, correctly I think, that belief contents do not mirror intentional contents of perception in the sense in which I am using the term. If our putative inverted twins bothsee a ripe tomato and have intentional color contents representing it as red (and the same shade of red) but have different qualitative contents, we would be reluctant to say that they have exactly the same color-relevant beliefs about the tomato. For the twins have different qualitative beliefs about the color of the tomato, where a qualitative belief is a belief that includes a color quale (or, alternatively, a belief that represents the tomato as having a certain phenomenal property in Shoemaker’s sense of the term). Another way of seeing Jacob’s point would be to think of the intentional contents of perception as individuated bothin terms of reference and mode of presentation, where qualia are taken as modes of presentation of those referential contents as suggested by Tyler Burge (2003). Nothing hangs on how we use the term ‘intentional content’ (and I will continue to use the term to mean colorrepresenting purely referential content). The important point is that if normal people can be inverted with respect to one another, there is an aspect of color experience that cannot be captured in ordinary language in terms of properties of objects. The Normality Principle links public language color terminology to intentional rather than qualitative contents of experience. I now turn to the argument for that link, and then to arguments for shifted and inverted spectra. 6. Color TermsExpressIntentional not Qualitative Contents Assuming without argument at this point that the dangerous scenario is possible, what exactly is the argument that color terminology (‘red’, ‘green’, etc.) is keyed to color-representing intentional contents rather than qualitative contents? In daily life, we do not distinguishbetween intentional and qualitative content, just as we do not normally distinguishbetween weight and mass or between rest mass and relativistic mass. Shouldn’t we suppose that there is some sort of indeterminacy, as with ‘mass’, where ordinary uses of the term ‘mass’ partially denote both, as argued plausibly by Hartry Field (Field, 1973)? In (Block, 1990), I argued that if spectrum inversion is known to be rife, it would make sense to think of our tacit semantic policy as one of using color terms as applied to experience to denote intentional contents of experience, since when we say of someone that the fire hydrant looks red to him, we often know what the intentional content is, but not what the qualitative content is. So how can we be understood as attributing a qualitative content? However, we do not know86 / Ned Block whether spectrum inversion is actually rife (cf. (Byrne, 2006), §3.8). Is there an argument from our lack of knowledge whether or not inversion is rife to the same conclusion? Yes, a similar argument applies. When we say of someone that the fire hydrant looks red to him, we can know what the intentional content is—say if we know that conditions are normal and the perceiver’s visual system is normal (excluding crossed wires)—but not, without examining the subject’s brain, what the qualitative content is. If phrases like “looking red” were intended to apply to qualitative contents, we would have a vulnerability to widespread error that we tacitly assume that we do not have. For example, we assume that we all stop at stop-lights in part because they look red to us, and no one would take that assumption to be overturned by finding out that everyone has a slightly different spectrum. Of course if everyone has the same spectrum except for a few defectives who see red things as green, we do think that stoplights do not look red to the defectives. My point rather is that if spectra vary from normal person to normal person, we would not take that to impugn our judgment that stoplights look red. And the fact that we do not know whether this is true (and that there is some evidence that it is true) shows that a reasonable semantic view would hold that looking red is not a qualitative content. I have some agreement with Frege when he says “Often, therefore, a colour word does not signify our subjective sensation, which we cannot know to agree with anyone else’s.” I would take the “cannot know” to mean in practice rather than in principle, since I think perceptual neuroscience is making great strides in that direction. The Fregean point is very easily available to language users. I became aware of it as a child. And my seven-year old daughter commented on first hearing the inverted spectrum hypothesis that it explained why some people didn’t have purple as their favorite color.19