Russell, Sense Data, and Qualia

Reader K. G. writes,

I recently came across a passage in Russell's Mysticism and Logic which you may find interesting. In the essay "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter," Russell writes (p. 144), "… the existence of sense-data [qualia] is logically independent of the existence of mind, and is causally dependent upon the body of the percipient, rather than upon his mind.” [. . .] On the contrary, I propose that any tenable definition of qualia must construe them as mental items, i.e. items whose esse is their percipi. [. . .]

 

What are your thoughts on this argument?

 

I think you are confusing qualia with sense data.  I grant you that qualia are mental items, and that they cannot exist apart from minds.  But sense data are not qualia.  First of all, Russell does not use 'quale' (singular) or 'qualia' (plural) in the two essays you mention.  But he does tell us what he means by 'sense data':  ". . . I believe that the actual data in sensation, the immediate objects or sight or touch or hearing, are extra-mental, purely physical, and among the ultimate constituents of matter." (10th ed., 128)

 

Suppose I am staring at a blue coffee cup.  The particular blue that I visually sense, precisely as I sense it, is a sense datum: it is the direct or  immediate object of my visual sensing.  It is distinct from the sensing. The sensing is something I undergo or experience or live through; it is part of my mental life.  As such it is mental in nature.  The sense datum, however, is not mental.  It is not an episode of experiencing or part of an episode of experiencing; it is the direct object of  an experiencing.  For Russell, the blue sense datum is not only not mental; it is physical: it is a proper part of the coffee cup.  I read Russell in these essays as a bundle theorist: physical objects are bundles of sense data both synchronically and diachronically.

 

Note also that while a blue sense datum is blue, a sensing of a blue sense datum is not blue.  (An adverbialist who speaks of sensing-blue-ly gives up the act-object schema that Russell presupposes.) 

 

Sense data, then, are objects of sensings.  For Russell, they are extra-mental and indeed physical.  Qualia, however, are the phenomenal characters of experiencings.  For example, the felt quality, the what-it-is-like, of a twinge of pain, precisely as it is felt.  Or the smell of burnt garlic.  Or the taste of licorice. 

 

There are many tricky questions here.  Suppose I am given a piece of black, semi-soft candy and asked  what it is.  I put it in my mouth to find out.  I discover that it is a piece of licorice.  I seem to have discovered something objective about a physical object, namely, that this bit of candy is licorice.  This would suggest that the object of my gustatory sensing is extra-mental and indeed physical.  Or should we say merely that I had a gustatory experience with a certain phenomenal character and that the characteristic taste of the thing I put in my mouth is wholly mental in nature?

 

Comments

[Alex Leibowitz]

By "data" does Russell mean what appears in experience or the appearance of it? You are saying that he means what appears in experience, which is some part of a physical object, whereas its appearance in experience, on the other hand, is a quale -- not a physical, but a mental object. Is that right?

[Bill Vallicella]

He means what appears. You have to distinguish between the sensing and the datum sensed. The former is mental, the latter physical. It is something like a trope. I'll bet that D.C. Williams got some of his ideas from those 1915 essays of Russell.

It is a curious doctrine; I am not endorsing it; and R. later dropped it if memory serves. R. changed his mind a lot.

Is an appearing of blue a quale? I would say No since the appearing or sensing seems to have no introspctible phenomenal quality at all -- unlike a pain which does have an introspectible phenomal quality.

Borrowing a term from Moore, the sensing of blue appears to be "diaphanous."

[Alex Leibowitz]

Is the introspectible phenomenal quality of pain that it hurts (or is otherwise unpleasant)?

[Bill Vallicella]

We ought to distinguish in a pain the felt sensation from its painfulness.

Suppose at the start of a hike my hands are cold. I say to myself: Look, man, it's only a sensation. Man up! The painfulness goes down and sometimes disappears but the sensation remains. I would say that both are introspectible, that both are phenomenal characters of the experience, and that therefore both together make up the sensory quale.

So it is not just the hurtingness or unpleasantness of a pain that is the quale, but that together with the felt sensation itself precisely as it felt by a particular perceiver at a particular time.

[Alex Leibowitz]

Thanks for clarifying. So if the unpleasantness of pain is introspectible, as well as the sensation of pain itself, why isn't the blueness of blue introspectible?

I always understood colors to be at least partially or perhaps only qualia, and I thought for instance that the inverted spectrum argument was meant to prove that.

[BV]

I suppose the short answer is that no mental state is blue in the way some mental states are painful.

Do a little phenomenology. Stare at a blue coffee cup. The blueness appears at the cup. The sensing, which is distinct from the datum sensed, does not appear as blue.

It is not by introspection that I know that the cup is blue but by extrospection.

[Alex Leibowitz]

I see your point; however, I think it's a little controversial (i.e. substantive). Many philosophers (going, as you certainly know, all the way back to Descartes) would claim that the cup is blue, if at all, in quite a different way than my experience of it as being blue would lead me to believe. Given such a claim, what else can the blueness as I experience it be but something mental? Granting it's not a quale, what other kind of mental items are there? What is the difference between a quale and what the empiricists called "images"?