The transparency of experience is the idea in the philosophy of mind that perception and other conscious experiences are phenomenally transparent. This means that experiences like perception present the properties of objects—like the redness of a tomato—but never the properties of experience itself. In this way, it is said that "we see right through" experience, making it difficult or even impossible for introspection to reveal its intrinsic properties.
Philosophers debate whether experience is fully transparent or whether it is sometimes possible to access the properties of experience. Proposed counterexamples in which features of the experience are said to be directly accessible include itches, pains, emotions and moods. The transparency of experience is most commonly accepted for perceptual experiences, particularly visual perception, but proposed counterexamples also include visual experiences like blurred vision. Philosophers also debate what implications the transparency of experience has for the possibility of introspective knowledge.
The transparency of experience has been interpreted in many ways. Most commonly, it is used to argue for the idea that mental experiences are fundamentally representational, a view called intentionalism or representationalism. This argument is sometimes extended to claim that there are no purely qualitative aspects of experience, or qualia, because all experiences have some representational content. The transparency thesis has also been used to argue for direct realism, disjunctivism, and various other views in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of perception.
The transparency of experience has been traced back to modern philosophy in the writings of Thomas Reid, but it became more prominent in twentieth century philosophy due to famous passages in the works of G. E. Moore and Gilbert Harman.
Background Traditionally, philosophers have identified two separate aspects of experience: a representational aspect and a sensational aspect. The representational aspect, which is called intentionality, is an experience's ability to represent or to be directed towards things. The sensational aspect, also called the phenomenal character of the experience, is the way that the experience subjectively feels. The phenomenal character of experiences is also sometimes referred to as qualia. In a more narrow sense, qualia are specifically the nonrepresentational aspects of phenomenal experience, which are generally thought to be an intrinsic feature of experiences.
In the philosophy of mind, some theories attempt to explain what the mind is and what all mental states have in common. One of these theories is intentionalism or representationalism. This is the view that all mental states are intentional; that is, they all have some representational content. In general, intentionalism denies the claim that there can be aspects of experiences that are purely qualitative and nonrepresentational. It attempts to explain the phenomenal feeling of experience with its representational content. It can be contrasted with qualia theories that focus on the importance of nonrepresentational qualia to explain conscious experience.
Transparency
The transparency of experience claims that during introspection one can only identify the properties of represented objects, not the phenomenal qualities of experience itself. Philosophers refer to this phenomenon as transparency because it suggests "we see right through" experience directly to external objects. Philosophers sometimes use specific examples to explain this idea. For example, Jaegwon Kim states:Suppose you are looking at a ripe tomato, in good light. You have a visual experience with certain qualitative characters, or qualia—say, redness and roundness. Focus your attention on these qualia and try to determine the exact hue of the color, the precise shape you see, and so on—that is, try to closely inspect the qualities characterizing your experience. When you do this, some philosophers say, you will find yourself focusing on and examining the qualities of the tomato out there in front of you. Your visual experience of the tomato is "diaphanous," or "transparent," in that when you try to introspectively examine it, you seem to look right through it to the properties of the object seen, namely, the tomato.Philosophers also compare experience to a painting. When looking at a painting, one can focus on what it represents. The Mona Lisa, for instance, portrays a woman with a subtle smile. It is also possible to focus on the paint itself, by looking at the shape of the brushstrokes or the specific hues used to portray light and shadow. According to the transparency of experience, it is possible to focus on what experiences represent, but one cannot focus on any "mental paint". Gilbert Harman uses the example of a painting of a unicorn. The unicorn is represented as having four legs and a horn; the painting itself has no legs or horns, and is flat and made of paint. Likewise, when one has a visual experience, Harman claims that it is important to distinguish the properties of the represented object from the properties of the experience itself. According to Harman, people cannot access any properties of experience that go beyond represented properties.
The transparency of experience is usually interpreted as involving a positive claim and a negative claim. The positive claim states that the properties of external objects can be directly attended to in experience. The negative claim states that the properties of the experience itself cannot be directly attended to. Philosophers vary on whether transparency involves just the positive claim, just the negative, or both together. Philosophers also disagree how much transparency implies about experience. Some view it as a phenomenological claim about how experiences subjectively seem. Others view it as a metaphysical claim not just about the way experiences seem, but the way they actually are.
Philosophers have held the transparency of experience in varying levels of strength; Amy Kind distinguishes between two views called the weak transparency thesis and the strong transparency thesis. According to the weak transparency thesis, it is difficult to introspect directly to the features of experience, but possible with close attention. The strong transparency thesis, by contrast, claims that it is impossible to directly attend to the features of experience, no matter how hard one tries.
The transparency of experience is distinct from various other ideas also labelled transparency within the philosophy of mind and related areas. One view famously associated with René Descartes, called epistemic transparency or "the transparency of mind to itself", claims that a person cannot be wrong about their own current mental state. Another separate concept is referential transparency, the extent to which co-referring terms (like Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, which both refer to the same person) can be substituted in sentences without altering their truth value. The idea of transparency is also applied to beliefs and self-knowledge. For example, Gareth Evans claims that considering the question about oneself "Do I believe climate change is real?" is the same as considering the question about the world "Is climate change real?", making self-knowledge transparent to the world.
Generality and scope Philosophers debate the generality and scope of the transparency of experience. Some philosophers, like Michael Tye, believe that all experiences are transparent and attempt to show how different experiences display transparency. Others restrict the transparency of experience to specific types of experience, usually perceptual experiences such as visual perception. Critics of the transparency of experience, like Ned Block, attempt to provide counterexamples to the idea. These are usually examples where there is a feeling to the experience that goes beyond its representational content.
The transparency of experience is most commonly discussed in relation to visual perception but philosophers have applied the idea to the other senses too. Clare Batty has argued that the sense of smell is transparent because smells are experienced as "out there" or "around me", not as a part of the experience itself. Tye has likewise argued that smelling, hearing and tasting are all experienced as properties of external things (odors, sounds, and tastes). According to Amy Kind, however, the cases of hearing, tasting, and touch have not been extensively discussed, and analyses of vision should not be automatically assumed to extend to other senses.
One problem for the transparency of experience are common-sensibles, things that can be sensed through multiple different senses. For example, it is possible to see that a coin is round and to feel its shape in one's hand. The represented feature of roundness is the same in both experiences, but it is possible to distinguish qualitatively between the sight and the touch. This is a problem for the idea of transparency because it implies that there is something accessible to experience that is not a property of represented objects, namely what sense is producing the experience. Some philosophers respond to this idea by claiming that transparency only applies within sense modalities but not between them. Others claim that there are representational differences between the senses that account for the ability to distinguish between them.
Beyond perceptual experiences, Tye and Tim Crane have attempted to expand transparency to bodily sensations like itches and pains. According to Tye and Crane, pains are experienced as located in the body, and introspection simply leads to a focus on the pain being in specific body parts. Critics of transparency have pointed to the unpleasantness or painfulness of pain as a nonrepresentational part of pain experiences; one that is felt as a part of the experience, not a represented property of external things. Block also points to the example of orgasms, stating that they are "phenomenally impressive" in a way that goes beyond their representational content.
Another area where transparency is controversial is the experience of emotions and moods. These experiences seem neither to have any representational content nor to be located anywhere in the external world. Nonetheless, Tye has attempted to expand transparency to these experiences. For example, emotions of jealousy, anger or joy are often felt in the body, such as in a sinking of the stomach or heightened heartbeat. Likewise, he claims that more general moods, like depression or anxiety, represent the entire world in a particular light, perhaps as dangerous or pointless. Critics claim that if moods and emotions do have representational content, it is still only a minor part of the whole feeling of the experience.
A counterexample appealed to within visual perception is blurred vision. It is used as a counterexample to transparency because blurriness seems to be a property of the experience itself, not the way things are represented. For example, blurred vision of a tree does not represent the tree itself as having the property of blurriness. Proponents of transparency argue that blurred vision is still fully representational, just at a lower resolution, although some critics claim this simply misses the point that blurriness is presented as a property of experience, not a property of represented objects. Other proposed counterexamples include double vision, phosphene images, and afterimages.
The transparency argument