François Recanati

Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit

Collège de France

Année 2023-2024

Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : Transparency and Phenomenal Structure in Phenomenological Reflection

Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit

Intervenant(s)

Julien Bugnon, Université de Fribourg & LOGOS

Let a property concept be transparent if and only if a thinker who has acquired such a concept is in a position to fully understand the nature of the property it is a concept of. Proponents of phenomenal transparency contend that at least some phenomenal concepts are transparent concepts. Yet they also typically make use of an additional claim when arguing against physicalism: two distinct transparent concepts of one and the same property will not be cognitively independent – that is, a thinker possessing two such concepts should in principle be able to discover a priori that they pick out the same property. This has a straightforward implication for the phenomenal concepts we form: we should be in a position to know a priori whether two of our transparent phenomenal concepts are coextensive or not. I discuss the consequences of that last claim for the view that we can form structural transparent phenomenal concepts by understanding how a given phenomenal property is embedded into a particular phenomenal structure. Moreover, this discussion has wider implications for the nature and a priori status of phenomenological reflection, conceived as a form of reflection on our own conscious experiences in order to achieve knowledge about the structure of human consciousness in general.