Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology

Forms of Awareness and “Three-Factor” Theories

226 I n my contribution to part 1 of this volume, I discussed Rand’s view of awareness as an activity the identity of which is not exhausted by its objects, and I emphasized her distinction between the form of an act of awareness and its object, which I illustrated with a brief discussion of its application to sense-perception. I indicated there how the distinction can be used to counter some standard objections to direct-realist views of perception like Rand’s, and Onkar Ghate treated this topic in much greater detail (and in somewhat different terminology) in his contribution to part 1.1 In the last decade especially, there has been a lot of interest in direct realism, and some views have emerged that are similar to Rand’s in that their analysis of perception includes, in addition to the subject and the object, a “third factor” that plays a role similar to Rand’s idea of form. Among the proponents of such a position are Bill Brewer and John Campbell , the latter of whom is of particular interest because he takes his third factor to be a feature not just of perception, but of consciousness as such. Forms of Awareness and “Three-Factor” Theories Gregory Salmieri 1. For more in-depth treatments of perception based on Rand’s, see Kelley 1986 and Ghate 1998. Forms of Awareness and “Three-Factor” Theories ■ 227 Considering Brewer and Campbell’s positions, and what I take to be an inadequacy they share, will help to bring out what is distinctive and significant about the idea of forms of awareness. In order to set a context for this contrast, I will begin by cataloging some significant points on which Rand, Ghate, Campbell, Brewer, and I are in agreement. We view perception as the foundation of thought and knowledge and endorse a direct realist, relational, and nonconceptual account of perception. It is worth pausing over the several shared points of agreement here. The first is realism (as opposed to idealism)—the position that in perception we are aware of mind-independent things rather than only of intramental items. The second point of agreement is that, in many cases at least, we are aware specifically of entities, as opposed to merely being aware of qualities, dispositions, etc. (as we might, perhaps, speculate that some of the lower animals are). Finally, this perceptual awareness of entities is direct in that it is not grounded in some more basic awareness of nonentities (either of mind-dependent objects of any sort, or of qualities , dispositions, etc.). Direct realism is to be distinguished from a position that used to be called representationalism, is now sometimes called indirect realism, but that I will call “traditional representationalism.”According to this view, we are aware directly of internal mental items which resemble or otherwise represent objects out in the world, and we are aware derivatively of these external objects either simply because of the relationship in which they stand to the representations or by means of some sort of inference that there must be something that stands in this relationship. Our shared position is also to be distinguished from views that hold that, though we are aware directly of some mind-independent things, the objects of our awareness do not include entities but only qualities or dispositions—things like sounds or expanses of color. On this view, our awareness of the entities that have the qualities or dispositions works in just the same way as it does in the case of traditional representationalism, except that the intermediate object, by knowing which we are derivatively aware of the entities, is extramental rather than mental. Finally, the shared position on perception can be contrasted with what Brewer calls “the content view”—a position that is sometimes now referred to as “representationalism” and which I will call “newfangled representationalism.” Whereas both our consensus position and traditional representationalism agree in thinking of perception primarily as a relation between the subject and an object (whether mind-dependent or 228 ■ Gregory Salmieri mind-independent), newfangled representationalism sees it as a relation to a judgeable content—something like a proposition which represents the world as being a certain way (with this ability to represent then being cashed out usually in functional and/or information-theoretic terms). This last view is like traditional representationalism in that it takes perception to consist in having some state, which one...