(Written in 2005 for a festschrift in honor of Jaegwon Kim)TROUBLES FOR RADICAL TRANSPARENCYWith phenomenal characters, we seem finally to have come face to face with paradigmatic instances of intrinsic properties. The hurtfulness of pain, the acrid smell of sulphur, the taste and flavor of pineapple—these things are intrinsic qualities if anything is.1 Jaegwon KimIt is an honor to take part in this festschrift for Jaegwon Kim, from whose publications, presentations, and conversation I have learned so much during our time together as colleagues. This essay is dedicated to Jaegwon with thanks and appreciation.* * * * * * * * * *In a famous passage in “The Refutation of Idealism,” G.E. Moore said that consciousnessis transparent or diaphanous.2 His language is echoed by many contemporary writers, who have discussed the pros and cons of a thesis often called “the transparency of experience” and sometimes traced back to Moore. Yet what Moore himself meant by ‘transparency’ is different from, and in one important way more radical than, what contemporary writers usually mean by the term. In this essay, I do three things. First, I distinguish the Moorean from the contemporary doctrines that typically go under the label of ‘transparency’. Second, I discuss two contemporary philosophers—Campbell and Dretske—who may espouse a view like Moore’s, if only implicitly. Third, I identify two implications of the genuinely Moorean view that I regard as problematic. These implications may not give rise to decisive objections, but I believe we should give them due regard before accepting a thesis of radical transparency.1 Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), p. 176.2 G.E. Moore, “The Refutation of Idealism,” in Philosophical Studies (London: Kegan Paul, 1922), pp. 1-30 (originally in Mind, 1903).1. Contemporary transparency viewsWhat is commonly meant in recent literature by the transparency of experience is that we seldom (if ever) notice the intrinsic features of our sensory experiences.3 We look past or through those experiences to the external things that are their objects. Here is a representative quotation, from Christopher Hill:Belief-generating sensations are diaphanous—they mediate our awareness of extramental objects and extramental states of affairs, but normally they are not objects of awareness in their own right.4 Here is another, from Gilbert Harman:When Eloise sees a tree before her, the colors she experiences are all experienced as features of the tree and its surroundings. None of them are experienced as intrinsic features of her experience. Nor does she experience any features of anything as intrinsic features of her experiences. And that is true of you too. . . .When you see a tree, you do not experience any features as intrinsic features of your experience. Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic features of your visual experience. I predict you will find that the only features there to turn your attention to will be featuresof the presented tree.5Others could be cited to similar effect.6 Hill and Harman do not deny that experiences have intrinsic features. Their point is simply that we are not aware of any intrinsic features of experience. This comes out in Harman’s concessions about what he calls “mental paint:” 3 There are other meanings of ‘transparency’ with which I shall not be concerned here. Mental states are sometimes said to be transparent in either or both of these senses: you cannot be in them without believing that you are (self-intimacy), and, conversely, you cannot believe that you are in a given mental state unless you actually are in that state (infallibility). See Kim, Philosophy of Mind, pp. 17-18.4 Christopher S. Hill, Sensations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 187.5 Gilbert Harman, “The Intrinsic Quality of Experience,” in Philosophical Perspectives, edited by James Tomberlin, Vol. 4 (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1990), 52-79; reprinted in The Nature of Consciousness, edited by Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Guven Guzeldere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1997), 663-75. The quotation is from p. 667 of the latter.6 For example, Michael Tye glosses ‘your experience is transparent to you’ as ‘you are not directly aware ofany qualities of your experience.’ See his Consciousness, Color, and Content (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), p. 47.2But in the case of her visual experience of a tree, I want to say that she is not aware of, as it were, the mental paint by virtue of which her experience is an experience of seeing a tree. She is aware only of the intentional or relational features of her experience, not of its intrinsic nonintentional features.7These lines come immediately after a paragraph in which Harman says that Eloise is “notaware of those intrinsic features of her experience by virtue of which it has that content.” So it is clear that by ‘mental paint’, Harman means the intrinsic features of experiences invirtue of which they represent what they do. I think it is also clear that he does not (at least in this place) deny the existence of such paint. He merely denies that subjects are aware of it. For Harman, then, the only intrinsic features we are aware of when we try to introspect our experiences are features of the presented object, and the only features of our experience that we are aware of are its relational or intentional features—its presenting an object of this or that kind. The motives for transparency views such as the foregoing are multifarious. Sometimes the motive is to make room for direct realist theories of perception—theories according to which we are aware of external things and not merely goings-on in our own minds. Sometimes the motive is to make the world safe for materialism—if we are not aware of intrinsic features of our experiences, then we cannot claim that experiences havefeatures that no brain state could have.8 And sometimes the motive is to pave the way fora representationalist or intentionalist view of experience—a view according to which the 7 GET PP.8 Such was the motive for Smart’s thesis of “topic-neutrality,” a version of transparency, in the early days ofidentity-theory materialism. Smart held that we can