Philosophical Psychology Vol. 19, No. 1, February 2006, pp.

312

A Point of View on Points of View

John Biro

A number of writers have deployed the notion of a point of view as a key to the allegedly theory-resistant subjective aspect of experience. I examine that notion more closely than is usually done and find that it cannot support the anti-objectivists case. Experience may indeed have an irreducibly subjective aspect, but the notion of a point of view cannot be used to show that it does. Keywords: Consciousness; Experience; Objectivity; Point of view; Subjectivity

The holy grail of a complete theory of the mental has beckoned philosophers for centuries, ever more enticingly in recent times, full as these have been with exciting scientific advances in our understanding both of the nature and workings of the brain and, as some see it, of the nature and workings of the mind. But there is a line of thought that urges caution. It warns that while many questions about the mind may indeed increasingly seemand, perhaps, really aretractable, one is destined to elude any scientific or philosophical answer. And, alas, that aspect is the most important one of all: consciousness, experience of the sort with which every one of us is intimately familiar, in the absence of which none of our theorizing would be about minds, even if it was about thought in some sense.1 There seems to be something ineffable about conscious experience: it may be radically theory-resistant, indeed, some even think, beyond the reach of human understanding.2 The reason, these philosophers say, is that all theory aims at, and is limited to, objective descriptions of phenomena and of the laws that govern them, whereas experience (I shall drop the conscious, even if it is not redundant) has an ineliminably subjective aspect. Many have been attracted to this line of thought, though it is by no means universally accepted.3 For what it is worth, I side with the dissenters. But my purpose in this paper is not to try to assess the overall argument for such pessimism about the possibility of a science of the mind. I have made efforts in that direction in a pair
Correspondence to: John Biro, Department of Philosophy, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA. Email: jbiro@phil.ufl.edu
ISSN 0951-5089 (print)/ISSN 1465-394X (online)/06/010003-12 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09515080500471835

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of earlier papers (Biro, 1991, 1993), in which I took Thomas Nagels (1974) question, What is it like to be a bat? and his influential discussion of it as my stalking horse. That question is usually understood to be one about types of experience and, indeed, Nagel sometimes insists that that is how he intended it to be understood: I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question in not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type (p. 441). At the same time, he frequently talks as if he meant just the opposite. Perhaps . . . the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism (p. 436) and [subjective facts] appear to be facts that embody a particular point of view (p. 441) can be interpreted as being about types, but what of . . . every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view (p. 437) and the problem is not confined to exotic cases . . . but exists between one person and another (p. 440)? These ways of putting things (and other instances could be cited) strongly suggest that we are to think of a point of view as a particular, unique to its possessor. Thought of in this way, a point of view discloses to the being who has it, and to that being only, facts in principle unavailable to any other being, even to one similar to it in whatever respect is thought relevant. Perhaps Nagels nominal questionWhat is it like to be a bat?can be answered only by a bat. But, the question he seems most interested innamely, what is it like to be this bat? could be answered only by this bat and no other. Likewise with people: the problem is not confined to exotic cases . . . but exists between one person and another. Thus it seems clear that for Nagel subjectivity is to be tied to individual points of view, as, indeed, one might expect. But if that is what Nagel had in mind, his question should have been,What is it like to be Bat? and his conclusion, that no one but Bat can answer this question, not even another bat. Can Bat (or some other bat) answer Nagels actual question? Obviously, if he is a bat, he can. And if Pat is also a bat, Bat will have answered the question for her, too, even if unable to answer the question, What is it like to be Pat? There is, nevertheless, wide-spread agreement that in spite of the appearance given by remarks such as those just cited about the problems existing between individuals even of the same kind, Nagel should be understood as talking about types of, rather than individual, points of view.4 After all, the fact that bat experience is exotic is central to his argument: It is the fact that bats as a species are different from human beings that stands in the way of the latters knowing or imagining or conceiving an answer to Nagels question.5 He needs to exploit general facts about the kind of sensory apparatus and, hence, it is assumed, the kind of experience, bats have in order to dramatize the (alleged) fact that we, with our very different senses and experience, cannot even imagine an answer to the question.6 One could give many examples of other writers who lean on the notion of a point of view (sometimes a perspective) in their attempts to bring out the sense in which experience is supposedly radically subjective and theory-resistant. In some of their discussions, too, there is often uncertainty about whether they have in mind individual or generic points of view (Bats or any bats). But, clearly, the radical

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subjectivist needs to rest his claims on considerations involving the former. Thus we see Colin McGinn (1983) insisting:
. . . it is the perspectival character of indexical modes of presentation that stands outthe way they incorporate and reflect a point of view on the world . . . . This perspective is something possessed by a psychological subject; and it is the subjectivity of the subject that makes it proper to regard the indexical modes of presentation constitutive of a perspective as themselves subjective. (p. 17)7

The appeal to indexicality shows that what is important for McGinn is the link between subjectivity and individual points of view. (There is nothing indexical about a battish perspective as such, as there is, arguably, about Bats.) In John Searles (1992) hands, the idea of a proprietary point of view and of the facts disclosed from it to its owner lead to even more startling conclusions: since every conscious state is always someones conscious state (for a pain to be a pain, it must be somebodys pain), such states have a different ontological status from ordinary ones and from states which are objective in virtue of being accessible from different points of viewthey have a subjective mode of existence (pp. 9495). Searle also describes such a mode of existence as a first-person mode of existence (p. 94) and speaks of ones subjective, first-person point of view (p. 117), showing that he, too, thinks that it is individual points of view that have this special feature of subjectivity. (Again, seeing things in a bat-like way is not enough for seeing things in a first-person way, bat-like or not.)8 In what follows, my focus will be not, as in the earlier papers mentioned, on whether the notion of a point of view or perspective can buttress the radical subjectivist conclusion about experience. My present interest is, rather, in the notion of a point of view itself. The question I shall be addressing is whether there is a coherent notion in the offing at all, of either the individual or the general kind. My conclusion will be that there is, but only of the second. One finds three central notions in the brief illustrations I have given of the subjectivist argument I have sketched: (a) that of a point of view, or perspective; (b) that of the ownership of experience; and (c) that of the indexicality of experience. The three are intimately related, of course, and the hope must be that each can serve to clarify the others, so that the kind of subjectivity experience is alleged to have is, in turn, clarified through them. In what follows, I shall have something to say about all three notions, though about the latter two only as they are supposed to bear on the first. How, then, are we to think of points of view? Let us approach the question by asking, what makes a point of view the point of view it is? How can points of view be individuated? On the most literal interpretation of the expression point of view, the answer to this question must be: spatial location.9 Locations are occupierindependent, though: However we think a location in space is best specified, it seems clear that its identification as the location it is does not involve reference to the thing, if any, that occupies it. The other obvious way to individuate points of view, it may seem, is by reference to their owners. Thus we speak of Xs point of view and think of that point of view as

J. Biro

the same wherever, from time to time, X happens to be, as something he takes with him wherever he goes. On this way of thinking of points of view, reference to their owner is essential to their individuation. Of course, we often employ the expression point of view in a less literal sense (as I do in the title of this paper). When we do so, what we usually have in mind is, roughly speaking, a set of beliefs, desires and attitudes, a location, as it were, in the space of beliefs, desires and attitudes.10 Here, too, such an attitudinal location is specifiable without reference to anyone who may occupy it. But, again, we can think of an attitudinal point of view as identifiable, and identifiable only, through essential reference to the person whose point of view it is. Then, if one point of view is Xs and another Ys, even if the contents of the two coincidei.e., if X and Y have exactly the same beliefs, desires and attitudesthey must be accounted distinct points of view. This, in turn, encourages the thought that an individuals point of view is essentially unique and that that must be taken into account in describing the content of his experience. But notice that in picking out Xs point of view thought of in this way, we need say (or know) nothing about its content. In fact, the content of Xs point of view maytypically doeschange over time, without that fact compromising its continuing identity. On the first of these two ways of individuating a point of view, a person holding it may or may not take it with him from time to time; on the second, he cannot help doing so. We can say that the first is content-based, the second, owner-based. Of course, those who deploy the notion of a point of view to argue for the essential subjectivity of experience typically have in mind something still different. For Nagel, the strangeness of the battish point of view and the consequent inaccessibility to us of bat experience are grounded in facts about the differences between our perceptual apparatus and that of bats. Given these differences, a bat and a person will see things differently even from the same spatial location. Note, however, that what type of perceptual apparatus a creature has is an objectively describable fact about that creature. Such considerations therefore merely introduce another dimension of which our specification of a generic point of view that different individuals can occupy must take note. In addition to the standard spatial coordinates, specifying a location in, as we might say, sensory space, would require as an additional parameter a perceptual-apparatus type. This yields no radical subjectivity.11 To get that, we need the claim that no two bats would see things in the same way even if they occupied the same location both in space and in sensory space (i.e., had the same kind of sensory apparatus). Once again, it is difficult to see what could underwrite such a claim short of an understanding of points of view as essentially tied to their owners. In an earlier attempt to clarify the notion of a point of view (Biro, 1991), I used the labels fixed and portable to distinguish these different ways of identifying one. There is a temptation to assimilate this distinction to the type-token distinction, one to which a number of writers have succumbed.12 But such an assimilation is a mistake. It is, I take it, a conceptual truth that for something to be a token of a type, it must have all and only the properties that define the type. If, as the subjectivity

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argument claims, a point of view individuated through essential reference to its owner (portable, in my terms) reveals something that a fixed point of view objectively individuated and multiply occupiable, hence a typeleaves out, the former cannot be a token of the latter. In distinguishing between the fixed and the portable conceptions of a point of view, I did not claim that the first was the right conception, the second, the wrong. I was concerned merely to show, first, that the two are often confounded and, second, that neither is capable of securing the radical subjectivist conclusion. Now I want to suggest that there are reasons to regard the second conception as suspect. It seems to me that considerations having to do with the ownership of a point of view or those to do with its alleged indexicality cannot shed light on what a point of view is. And, if they cannot, we are left without any coherent notion of a point of view other than the one the fixed construal gives us, a construal that obviously has no subjectivist implications. Let me begin by summarizing in a very general way the argument that on neither construal of the notion of a point of view do we get anything that can support the sweeping conclusions about the essential subjectivity of experience that Nagel and others wish to draw. This will, I hope, help us to see what is wrong with the second, the portable, construal itself. Suppose we ask, what does one learn when one learns that X has a certain point of view? The question is ambiguous. It may be understood as asking, what does one learn if one already knows (or is told by way of a description in the question itself) the content of the point of view construed in the fixed way? In that case, the answer is obvious: One learns that, as it happens, X occupies a certain spatial location and/or holds certain beliefs, desires and attitudes and/or has such and such a perceptual apparatus. These may be interesting and even important facts to learn about X, but do they add anything to the content of the point of view which, by hypothesis, one already knows? Seemingly, not. And if they do not add anything, then, a fortiori, they do not add anything radically subjective, anything inaccessible to others. The information that X holds point of view P is information at best about a relational property of P (and of X, of course) and, as such, does not bear on which point of view P is. But the question may also be interpreted in a different way. It may be understood as asking, what does one learn on being told which point of view Xs point of view is, i.e., what Xs location is in physical, attitudinal or sensory space? An answer to the question so understood would have to be a description of a point of view in the fixed sense, a description of a location without regard to whether anyone, including X, occupies it, even though we assume, in asking the question, that X in fact does. It seems, then, that on neither interpretation of the questionone as asking whose point of view a certain point of view is, the other asking which point of view a certain persons point of view isdoes an adequate answer require anything that is not statable in general, objective, terms. Considerations of ownership, then, do not seem to yield the key to anything substantively subjective. I say substantively subjective, since there is, of course, a trivial sense in which bringing in the notion of ownership eo ipso brings in reference to a subject. If Xs point of view is understood as (what I have called) portable,

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by definition, no one but X can have it. But if this is the only kind of subjectivity we can squeeze out of the notion of a point of view, it is hard to see how any interesting psychological, epistemological, let alone metaphysical, conclusions follow. Saying, as Searle (1992) does, that subjective modes of existence are different from objective, in that their owner has a special relation to [them], a relation no one else can have (p. 95), had better come to more than this! But, what more? And what do we learn about a point of view when we learn that it is Xs? Nothing, it seems; rather, we learn something about X. The notion of ownership is, in this context, closely tied to that of indexicality. We saw this tie made explicit in the passage cited from McGinn (1983). Now, just as with many other properties and relations, there are two ways of thinking of a location, spatial, attitudinal or sensory: one from the outside, as it were, one from the inside, from the point of view of the thing that has the property or relation. Thus I can think of, and describe, a property or a relation, without thinking of it as a property I have or a relation in which I stand. Whether I think of it so or not can be important, and, in most cases, it will make a difference to what I do. But note, first, that if all we can do to explain the difference between the outsiders and the insiders way of thinking of something is to appeal to the special point of view of the insider, we have fallen back on the very notion we are trying to explicate. And we can ask, once again, how the expression point of view is to be construed as it occurs in our explanation of the indexicality of the property. Second, and more important, if we ask what someone learns when he learns that a certain property is his, the right thing to say, just as before, is that he learns something about himself, rather than about the property.13 Again, any robustly subjective content a point of view or perspective is supposed to have and to disclose only to its possessor proves elusive. To bring out more clearly the triviality of indexicality with respect to points of view, let us consider a paradigm case of an indexical, here. One thinks of the referent of here as the place where one is at the time one uses it, in speech or in thought. But, of course, one may very well not know where that is. So, one may not know what the actual referent of the word is. Nonetheless, it has one: the place where one is when saying or thinking I am here. Someone else can describe that referent in a nonindexical way. In what way would his description be incomplete as a description of the referent? (No doubt it might suffer from some pragmatic incompleteness, if what is of conversational interest is precisely that the speaker is at that place.) As Zeno Vendler (1988) once put it (in an admittedly different context), There is no reason to think that the designation this (mine) or that (yours) brings in a new element. Indexicality is not a source of qualitative differences anywhere (p. 175).14 I have been rehearsing these considerations about ownership and indexicality to show that the argument for the radical subjectivity of experience that we began with cannot be supported by appeal to the notion of a point of view or perspective. But it should now be clear that the trouble goes deeper. It is not at all clear that there is a coherent notion of a point of view corresponding to what I have been calling the portable construal. All that portability seems to come to is the boring fact that a person can occupy different points of view from time to time (or at the same time

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in different possible worlds), just as one can wear different suits on different days. Granted, changing points of view is not as easy as changing clothes (though some people find it easier than others). But the important point is that just by wearing one of ones own suits one does not somehow bring into existence an extra suit of a special, subjective, kind. All the suits there are are those in ones wardrobe, and anyone (at least, anyone of the right size) can wear them. In the same way, there is no special place here, over and above all the places there are, and the place occupied by X is not, for that reason, special, just because it is designated by a use of here by X at a particular time. The same may be said about attitudinal space. A belief, or a desire, or an attitude is something one can adopt or shed, something one can try to persuade others to accept, share, reject or abandon. None of this would make any sense if a point of view were the sort of thing whose very identity depended on whose point of view it was, in the way that the portable construal we essayed would have it.15 Things may be thought to be different with respect to sensory space, though. Here, it may seem that moving around from location to location is not as easy as in the case of physical or even attitudinal space. Truebut that is only because one carries ones perceptual apparatus around with one, and there are nomological limits on the degree to which that apparatus can be altered. (Though that is just what one aims at in wearing ones glasses or hearing aid.) If, as suggested earlier, we include the type of sensory apparatus one has as one of the parameters in the specification of ones point of view, it will still be the case that different individuals with tokens of that sensoryapparatus-type can occupy the point of view in question. That is all that is needed to make the point of view both fixed and substantive in the sense of having a particular content. It seems, then, that appeals to ownership and to indexicality alike fail to give us a notion of a point of view that could be of help in explaining what it is for experience to be radically subjective. Worse, they fail to elucidate a notion of a point of view that has any content beyond its impersonal and non-indexical content, the content it has irrespective of who occupies it. Such appeals, appealing as they are, fail to deliver a genuinely rival notion to the notion of a point of view as fixed. But, as noted earlier, a point of view understood in that way is one that is describable objectively. Thus it seems that the proponents of the line of thought we began with must find some other way to explain the alleged radical subjectivity and theory-resistance of experience, one that does not rely on the notion of a point of view. Of course, the argument I have offered here that that notion is not up to the task is in no way intended to prove that such an alternative explanation cannot be found. What, then, are we finally to say about what a point of view is? If the above arguments are sound, the conclusion must be that it is a way of viewing things that some cognitive agent can adopt. His so doing says nothing about what that way, what that point of view, is. If X happens to adopt it, that is not an intrinsic, or individuating, property of the point of view in question, hence it makes no difference to what point of view that point of view is. Points of view, like propositional attitudes, are individuated by their contents, and someones adopting one, while it

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gives rise to relational properties of both the point of view and its adopter, makes no difference to the content of the point of view adopted. That remains what it was independently of Xs adoption of it, and we can know everything there is to know about it whether we know whether X has adopted it. In knowing that, if we do, we know something not about the point of view X has adopted but about X. And if this is right, it follows that there is nothing that X can come to know about that point of view by adopting it that the rest of us cannot know. There may be nomological reasons why Y cannot adopt the same point of view, but that does not mean that in adopting it, X gains access to a kind of fact ontologically different from those Y has access to from points of view he can adopt. Naturally, a (finite) being can gain access only to some of the facts available from the complete set of all points of view, since there are limits on which and how many (even over time) points of view he can occupy. But this does not mean that the facts to which he can gain access are of a different kind from any other.

Notes
[1] For an overview of this line of argument, see Davies and Humphreys (1993). There are some who go further and deny that it would be even about thought, agreeing with Searle (1992), who has vigorously argued that there can be no intentionality without consciousness. (For resistance, see Nelkin, 1993.) A prominent proponent of this contention is McGinn (1983). My criticism of his employment of the notion of a perspective is not intended as a challenge to his main argument for the ineradicable mysteriousness of consciousness (McGinn, 1999), which I find interesting and somewhat persuasive. Well-known recent proponents of some version of the line include, in addition to Searle (1992) and McGinn (1983), Jackson (1982), Levine (1983) and Nagel (1974). Noteworthy dissenters include Dennett (1991), Foss (1989), Russow (1982), and van Gulick (1985). See, for example, Mandik (2001). For reasons not to think of this difference as one between types and tokens, see below. Nagel (1974) speaks in all these ways about what it is that we cannot do. Actually, the differences among these characterizations do matter, but they will not play a role in my discussion. It is a curious feature of Nagels (1974) paper that his anti-physicalist argument rests on a premise that appears to assume at least a weak form of physicalism: that a (kind of) creatures physiology determines the nature of that (kind of) creatures experience. I discuss this feature in Biro (1991). While Nagel (1974) develops his notion of a point of view, initially, in terms of a creatures location in sensory space, he also argues that that location determines, at least to some extent, the creatures location in conceptual space. The notion of a perspective has, by contrast, sometimes been applied directly to intentional states. (Indeed, McGinns way of putting things in the passage just cited is clearly intended to be general enough to apply across the board.) On such application, see Loar (1987); for skepticism about it, see Biro (1992). The thought here seems to be that if it is necessary for a state to exist that it should have an owner, it is no ordinary state. But this cannot be right as just stated, since this necessary condition applies to many, perhaps all, perfectly ordinary states. Consider basic states of bodies: Nothing can be a state of being in motion, unless it is some bodys being in motion.

[2]

[3]

[4] [5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

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[9]

[10] [11] [12] [13]

[14] [15]

In fact, nothing can be a state without being a state of someone or something. Surely, something more is needed to make a state a state of a special kind than the fact that it needs an owner in this trivial sense. (As for how to understand subjectiveI discuss the various senses of objective with which subjective in Nagels (1974) and Searles (1992) sense might be contrasted in Biro (1993)) Or, perhaps, spatiotemporal location. I shall side-step the complications this would present for the common-sense picture that points in space are individuatable independently of time and that different things can occupy them at different times. I think this will not matter for present purposes. The important thing is that even a spatiotemporal location can be occupied by different things (including different observers) in different possible worlds. This is clearly not the case with the other way of individuating points of view about to be discussed. I shall sometimes use attitudinal to cover all the propositional attitudes involved in this conception. For a fuller discussion of this aspect of the matter, see Biro (1993) For some clear cases, see Biro (1993). Consider Perrys (1979) example of the shoppers discovery that it was he who had laid the trail of sugar he has been following on the supermarket floor. That discovery will certainly change his plan of action, from wanting to warn someone else to seeking to secure his own bags, and is, as Perry rightly insists, essential to the correct specification of the shoppers post-discovery propositional attitudes. But, important as the shoppers discovery is, what he discovers is a relational fact between an event (in this case) and himself, one that is not constitutive of what the event in question is. After all, a moment ago he believed that the same event was related in the same way to someone else! So, the defender of the notion of a point of view that is nontrivially subjective can get no mileage from considerations about the so-called essential indexical. (See Perry, 1979; Lewis, 1977; but also Millikan, 1990.) (I am grateful to David Copp and to a referee for this journal for pressing me on this.) Hare (1988, p. 282) agrees. See also Vendler (1984). It may be countered that the subjectivist is not saying that the identity of a point of view depends on whose it is, on whether it is Bats or Pats, only that depending on which it is, it will seem different to Bat and Pat, respectively. Truebut we have already seen that to think of something as ones own is to attribute a relational property to that thing and that to do so is to leave the intrinsic properties of the thing owned unchanged. It is not that such relational properties are unimportant: Realizing that I am the sugar-spiller does make all the differencebut not to what I am, namely, a sugar-spiller. Sugar-spilling is the same whoever does it, just as a point of view is the same whoever has it.

References
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Levine, J. (1993). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64, 354361. Lewis, D. (1977). Attitudes de dicto and de se. Philosophical Review, 88, 513544. Loar, B. (1987). Subjective intentionality. Philosophical Topics, 15, 8924. Maloney, J. C. (1985). About being a bat. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 63, 2649. Mandik, P. (2001). Mental representation and the subjectivity of consciousness. Philosophical Psychology, 14, 179202. McGinn, C. (1983). The subjective view. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. McGinn, C. (1999). The mysterious flame. New York: Basic Books. s, 24, 723734. Millikan, R. G. (1990). The myth of the essential indexical. Nou Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83, 435450. Nelkin, N. (1993). The connection between intentionality and consciousness. In M. Davies & G. Humphreys (Eds.) Consciousness (pp. 224239). Oxford, England: Blackwell. s, 13, 321. Perry, J. (1979). The problem of the essential indexical. Nou Russow, L.-M. (1982). Its not like that to be a bat. Behaviorism, 10, 5563. Searle, J. R. (1992). The rediscovery of the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. van Gulick, R. (1985). Physicalism and the subjectivity of the mental. Philosophical Topics, 13, 5170. Vendler, Z. (1984). The matter of minds. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Vendler, Z. (1988). Changing places. In D. Seanor & N. Fotion (Eds.), Hare and his critics (pp. 171183). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.