• DOI:10.1023/B:PHIL.0000014523.89489.59
• Corpus ID: 170961261

Is Experience Transparent?

@article{Siewert2004IsET,
  title={Is Experience Transparent?},
  author={Charles Siewert},
  journal={Philosophical Studies},
  year={2004},
  volume={117},
  pages={15-41}
}

• Charles Siewert
• Published 2004
• Philosophy, Psychology
• Philosophical Studies

1Consciousness, some say, is “transparent” to first-person acts of attention; experience is “diaphanous.” You might take this to suggest that when you try to focus attention on consciousness or experience itself, you find you cannot: attention “passes through” straight to the object you are conscious of – the object you experience. But the metaphor has been variously elaborated. Here are two recent invocations of transparency by philosophers who think it bears significantly on the nature of experience. Gilbert Harman (1990) writes: Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to the intrinsic features of your visual experience. I predict you will find that the only features there to turn your attention to will be features of the presented tree. And here’s one way Michael Tye (1995) puts the point: Try to focus your attention on some intrinsic feature of the experience that distinguishes it from other experience, something other than what it is an experience of. The task seems impossible: one’s awareness seems always to slip through the experience to blueness and squareness, as instanced together in an external object. In turning one’s mind inward to attend to the experience, one seems to end up concentrating on what is outside again, on external features or properties. Whatever the truth or import of transparency claims, they are generally offered on the basis of first-person reflection, or introspection, broadly construed. What I mean here is this. We can make first-person judgments attributing various sorts of experience to ourselves. And the warrant we have for making such judgments differs significantly in kind from that which other people ordinarily have or would need for the corresponding second or third person judgments about us. When Harman and Tye invite us to try to attend to our own experience, they are pretty clearly inviting us to confirm