Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Appendix A: Inverted Earth

1. What the thought experiment is for

Inverted Earth is the sharpest weapon the qualia realist has against strong representationalism. Ned Block built it to do one thing the older inverted-spectrum cases could not reliably do: pry phenomenal character and historically wide representational content apart cleanly, using the representationalist’s own commitments as the lever.1 If it works, the wide identity fails. Block interprets what remains as “mental paint,” an intrinsic phenomenal property of experience. That interpretation needs a further argument. A structural representationalist can also hold character fixed without positing any nonrepresentational residue.

The identity claim defended throughout Mind, Matter, and Meaning holds that phenomenal character consists in representational content of the right embodied, world-directed kind — and its phenomenal-externalist form is hostage to this case. If Block’s dissociation goes through, historically wide identity fails. Qualia realism does not follow automatically; a narrower structural intentionalism remains available. This entry sets out the case at full strength, isolates the premises everything turns on, and gives the book’s reply with its real costs before stating exactly what the case would and would not establish.

2. The canonical scenario

State it as Block states it, because a soft setup makes the reply worthless.2

Inverted Earth is a planet that differs from ours in two coordinated respects. First, every object has the complementary color of its Earthly counterpart: the sky is yellow, ripe tomatoes are green, grass is red. Second (and this is the move that defuses the obvious objection), the inhabitants’ color vocabulary is inverted to match, so they call their yellow sky “blue,” their red grass “green,” and so on. Their usage is internally coherent and, relative to their conventions, true: when a local says the sky is “blue,” she says something correct about a yellow sky.

You are fitted, while anesthetized, with color-inverting lenses, and the pigmentation of your own body is neutralized so that nothing looks off when you examine yourself. You are then transported to Inverted Earth without your knowledge. Because the lenses invert the light exactly as the planet inverts the objects, the two inversions cancel: the yellow Inverted-Earth sky, seen through your lenses, produces in you the very same phenomenal experience the blue Earth sky always did. You notice nothing. You look up, have what is phenomenally your familiar blue-sky experience, and, speaking as the locals do, call the sky “blue.” Everything coheres.

Now the argument runs in two stages.

On arrival. Your phenomenal character is unchanged: the lenses guarantee it. Block grants that your representational content is, for now, still Earthly (your experience still represents blue, your word “blue” still means blue), so you are now systematically misrepresenting: the objectively yellow sky looks blue to you. At this stage content and phenomenal character still travel together (both blue), and the representationalist has nothing to fear.3

After a long time. Here Block turns the screw with semantic externalism — the very doctrine the representationalist embraces in order to naturalize content.4 Meaning, on the externalist view, is fixed by causal-historical embedding in an environment, not by anything in the head (Twin Earth). So after years embedded in Inverted Earth’s physical and linguistic environment, your color states come to be about Inverted-Earth colors. Your word “blue” comes to mean what the locals mean by it — yellow. And your color experiences, Block claims, come to represent the local colors along with everything else. So your experience of the (objectively yellow) sky now represents yellow.

But your phenomenal character never moved. Through inverting lenses, the yellow sky still produces the same blue-type experience it produced on day one. So we have arrived at a clean dissociation: phenomenal character constant, representational content inverted. Two experiences, yours on arrival and yours fifty years on, are phenomenally identical yet representationally opposite. Your fifty-years-on experience is representationally identical to a native’s while being phenomenally opposite to hers. Phenomenal character cannot consist in representational content, because the two have come apart. What stayed fixed while the content rotated is the residue Block calls mental paint.5

3. The formal structure

  1. Phenomenal character is held fixed across the scenario. [stipulation — the lenses guarantee only that the proximal stimulation matches; whether that fixes the character is Section 4’s question]
  2. Representational content shifts over time, from representing blue to representing yellow. [from externalism about content + long-enough embedding]
  3. If phenomenal character consists in representational content, or if sameness of character and sameness of content are required in both directions, then a difference in content cannot coexist with sameness of phenomenal character.
  4. But (1) and (2) jointly describe exactly that combination: same phenomenal character, different content.
  5. Therefore strict identity and the biconditional form of strong representationalism fail if (1) and (2) hold together.
  6. That conclusion does not by itself refute the weaker claim that phenomenal character supervenes on content. Phenomenal-on-content supervenience requires same content to guarantee same character; it permits different contents to share a character.
  7. A further argument would therefore be needed to establish mental paint or qualia realism rather than a weaker dependence of character on content.

The whole load against identity sits on the pair (1) and (2): Block needs phenomenal character fixed and content rotating. Premise (3) states the stronger view under attack without inflating it into a claim about one-way supervenience. As Section 5 shows, the two representationalist replies attack the two different premises: Tye denies (1), as does this book for its own reasons; a Dretskean alternative the book declines denies (2). Either break defeats the proposed dissociation.

4. The pressure point

Two different things travel under the word “content” here, and they anchor at different speeds.

  • Doxastic and conceptual content — what your beliefs are about, what your color words refer to. This re-anchors with environmental immersion, quickly and by convention. That is just Twin Earth: live among speakers long enough and your “blue” follows their usage and the local stuff. Block is entirely right about this layer.
  • Experiential content — what your visual experience represents, the nonconceptual, poised, world-directed content the identity claim says phenomenal character consists in. This layer answers to no convention. If it re-anchors, it re-anchors the slow way, as the tracking relations that fix it are themselves re-tuned by years of consequential traffic with the new environment.

Distinguishing the layers matters because Block’s argument needs them fused: he takes the uncontroversial drift of the first, stipulates time enough, and lets the second drift with it. And here the book files no objection. Its own teleosemantics says addresses accrue and re-tune through a creature’s consequential history (Chapter 15), and decades of Inverted-Earth commerce are exactly such a history. Premise (2), read slowly enough, is true.

Which is why everything turns, instead, on premise (1), the stipulated constancy of phenomenal character across the whole stretch. The lenses guarantee matching proximal stimulation. They do not, without a theory of character, guarantee phenomenal sameness. But the critic need not install mental paint to supply that theory. A structural representationalist can identify character with the complete synchronic profile: the color-space relations, discriminations, expectations, attention, memory dispositions, and rational control. (The profiletrol that remain fixed in the case. Causal history can then fix a different, wider reference. Constancy has a public functional and representational criterion rather than a private inner gauge.

That account remains a theory, not a datum the lenses deliver. The wide phenomenal externalist denies it; the structural representationalist affirms it. Transparency does not choose between them, because both deny a second colored item and both treat the surface as presented. Inverted Earth therefore sets two theories of content and character against one another. It does not turn the structural theory into mental paint by naming it narrow.

5. The book’s reply

The reply has two layers: a first-order reply (the book, following Tye, denies premise (1) on its wide theory) and a second inquiry into what would follow if the structural rival preserved character while wide content changed.

5.1 The first-order reply — externalism the whole way down

Two routes are open to the representationalist, and the book’s choice between them should be stated in the open, because the field’s default expectation runs the other way.

The route the book takes: Tye’s, completed. Tye’s explicit reply to Block (Consciousness, Color, and Content, sec. 6.2, titled “Biting the Bullet on the Inverted Earth Objection”) grants the content shift and denies premise (1).6 Phenomenal character shifts in synch with the re-anchoring content, gradually, over the same long stretch, so the two never come apart; the traveler fails to notice because the change is slow and his standards of comparison drift with it.7 Far from the desperate concession it is usually taken for, this is just externalism declining to make an exception of experience — and it stands stable once two supports, both available in Tye’s own corpus and in this book’s earlier chapters, are added to it.

The first support is memory. The standing objection says phenomenal memory pins the old character: you remember the blue sky of your childhood, today’s sky matches the memory, so nothing has shifted.8 The reply distinguishes what a memory is of from what it now represents. A memory’s object stays history-pinned — Tye’s own case: years after a switch, my memory image of Thatcher remains an image of the earthly Thatcher I actually stood before, whatever I have since come to believe. But pinned reference buys no exemption for represented color. Represented color belongs to the same externalist economy as perception’s and re-tunes with it, and Tye marks the room the reply needs at just this joint: on Inverted Earth my memory image remains of the blue earthly sky of my youth while the color it represents the sky as having goes local. So the remembered sky matches today’s sky not because an old invariant survived but because the gauge slid in step — memory kept its object and lost its old calibration, and the instrument that might have reported the shift shifted too.

Block files this move as an ad hoc error theory — a defect charged to memory just when the theory needs one. The wide account has a principled answer: its content-fixing relations apply to memory as well as perception, so exempting memory would require a new rule. That shows the synch-shift reply is coherent on the book’s own semantics. It does not yet defeat the structural rival, which can keep the memory’s complete current role fixed while treating wide reference as nonphenomenal.

The exchange therefore ends less triumphantly and more usefully. Block has a datum, the manifest character of experience, but the claim that this character remains structurally fixed while wide content changes comes from a theory of phenomenal individuation. The book’s claim that character changes with wide content comes from its rival theory. Neither side reads its verdict straight off introspection. The book takes the synch-shift route because Chapters 4–6 make the broader abductive case for one wide content relation doing the work of accuracy, error, rational role, and phenomenal contrast. Inverted Earth is a consequence of that choice, not independent evidence for it. Section 5.2 states what would follow if the structural rival won this exchange.

The route the book declines: Dretskean anchoring. A representationalist can instead deny premise (2) at the experiential level. She holds that the visual system’s tracking disposition was fixed by its design and its Earthly calibration — the mechanism whose function is to indicate a specific objective reflectance-type9), that immersion feeds the mechanism inverted input without re-writing what it has the function of indicating, and that the traveler’s experience therefore represents blue forever and misrepresents the yellow sky for fifty years. Block states this evolutionary-anchoring reply in order to resist it,10 and it has real attractions: it spares the theory any talk of unnoticed phenomenal drift. The book declines it for two reasons of its own. First, its teleosemantics never froze addresses at first calibration: content accrues and re-tunes on the consumer side, through the creature’s own consequential history (the same consumer-history machinery that resolves Swampman in Chapter 15), and fifty years of successful commerce with local reflectances is that history par excellence. Second, the route’s verdict prices content at nothing: a perceiver whose color-guided dealings succeed flawlessly for a lifetime counts as misrepresenting throughout, at no cost, detectably by no one: content pinned to a standard his own economy never answers to, which is the same idleness the book refuses wherever it appears. The two routes’ residual costs differ. The no-shift route charges the perceiver with a lifetime of consequence-free misrepresentation, a content his own economy never answers to. The synch-shift route predicts an inversion no one could notice. The second cost remains genuine even without an inner gauge; it follows from treating historically wide address as constitutive of character. The book prefers that route because its consumer semantics permits re-anchoring and refuses content that no current or learned success can ever vindicate. Whoever prefers the no-shift route may keep it; either route blocks Block’s specific same-character/different-content construction on a wide representationalist theory. Section 5.2 addresses the structural alternative that accepts the construction.

5.2 What the dissociation would establish

Grant the full dissociation: the traveler’s complete synchronic presenting profile and phenomenal character stay fixed while historically wide content changes. The result would refute the wide identity defended in Chapter 6. The book should not hide that consequence behind parsimony. Same character with different wide content contradicts numerical identity.

It would not, however, establish mental paint. The structural representationalist already has a residue-free account of what stayed fixed: the complete current organization of color relations, discrimination, expectation, attention, memory, and control. That profile still presents the surface as colored and still supplies accuracy conditions at its own structural grain. Transparency remains intact because no inner patch appears.11 The dispute would concern which content belongs to phenomenal character, not whether character requires a nonrepresentational property.

The explanatory-role test still bears on Block’s stronger paint hypothesis. If a further intrinsic vehicle property enters, it needs to predict or explain a phenomenal contrast that the complete structural profile misses. Merely renaming the invariant profile as paint adds nothing.12 But that argument cannot be turned against structural representationalism itself. The structural rival adds no second property; it draws the phenomenal boundary inside content differently.

The ledger therefore stays exact. Inverted Earth threatens historically wide phenomenal identity. It does not by itself support qualia realism, and it leaves the book’s rejection of private paint, inner objects, and the Cartesian theater untouched. The book retains the wide identity because its cumulative account gives one world-involving content relation the work of fixing accuracy, error, rational role, and phenomenal contrast. If a better theory showed that complete synchronic structure fixes every phenomenal fact while wide reference varies behind it, the phenomenal-externalist part of the identity claim would need revision. The thought experiment identifies that vulnerability; it does not decide it.

6. Stress-test

Objection 1 — “The experience never re-anchors” (the teleological dig-in). The pressure Block aims at the evolutionary-anchoring reply, a Dretskean presses in mirror image against the book. Proper function is a historical property; decades on Inverted Earth re-describe a mechanism’s inputs without re-writing what it was selected to indicate; so experiential content stays Earth-anchored, premise (2) fails at the level that matters, and the bullet Tye and this book bite was never served. → Response: The book’s teleosemantics was never the frozen kind. Its addresses are fixed, and re-fixed, on the consumer side — by what a state’s uptake must be tracking for the taking-up to keep paying off, a relation that accrues through the creature’s own consequential history and keeps accruing.13 On that semantics, fifty years of flawless commerce with local reflectances is not noise the original calibration survives; it is the very kind of history that settles what the state now answers to. And the semantics carries its own brake, so the concession proves no more than it should: an address moves only where new consequential traffic recruits the state’s consumers to a new correspondence rule — success against the local reflectances doing the recruiting, in Chapter 15’s sense — never by exposure alone. The frog peppered with BBs gains no BB-content: strikes that pay nothing recruit nothing, and no consumer function stabilizes on them. Fifty years of paying commerce is recruitment’s paradigm, not a loophole in it; long illusions do not become veridical by longevity, because failure does not recruit. And note the shape of the disagreement: both representationalist routes break Block’s forbidden combination (the no-shift route holds content at blue with character at blue, the synch-shift route moves both together), so the choice between them is a quarrel inside the winning side. The book’s grounds for its choice are its own semantics, plus the idle cost of a lifetime of consequence-free “misrepresentation.” Verdict: the dig-in threatens the route’s motivation, never the identity claim; met on the book’s own semantics.

Objection 2 — “Even with fixed content, introspection still finds the paint” (Block, On a Confusion). Block argues introspection is unreliable, so the absence of a detected residue does not show its absence.14 → Response: Correct: introspective absence does not prove ontological absence. Section 5.2 therefore asks a different question. A further intrinsic property earns standing only if it explains a phenomenal contrast the complete structural profile misses. Inverted Earth supplies no such contrast by stipulation. That leaves paint unsupported, while the structural representationalist remains a live residue-free rival to the book’s wide view. Verdict: underdetermination blocks the inference to paint; it does not turn the wide identity into a theorem.

Objection 3 — the case pumps the wrong intuition. Inverted Earth is Block’s device; its native pull is anti-representationalist. A reader walked carefully through the lenses-and-tint stagecraft may simply feel the residue and leave convinced. → Response: A real danger about presentation, not soundness. The drama belongs on the gauge that slid with the scene (memory re-anchoring in step) and on the idle wheel, never on the setup; where that framing cannot be secured, the case is better answered in flat prose than staged. Verdict: managed by framing, not by argument.

Objection 4 — disjunctivist flanking. A disjunctivist might deny the common-factor assumption the whole scenario needs (that the arrival-experience and the native’s experience are states of the same fundamental kind). → Response: The book does not buy disjunctivism, and does not need to here: the reply to Inverted Earth runs within a common-factor framework by locating what the two experiences share in experiential content, not a shared inner object. Disjunctivism is a different quarrel (Ch. 3) and does no argumentative work in this case. Verdict: orthogonal; note and move on.

7. Secondary literature

Block introduced Inverted Earth in 1990 and gave it its most developed anti-Burgean, anti-representationalist form in “Mental Paint” (2003), where it stands beside the inverted-spectrum cases as joint pressure on the thesis that phenomenal character is exhausted by intentional content.15 The device descends from the classical inverted-spectrum tradition but is engineered to defeat the standard representationalist parry to that tradition. (The parry: spectrum inversion is either representationally detectable or incoherent) by holding behavior and representation-as-judged fixed while supposedly rotating experiential content.

On the representationalist side, Tye is the principal respondent, though the synch-shift move entered the exchange under Lycan’s flag: Block answers it as Lycan’s objection, noting he had foreseen it himself in 1990. In Consciousness, Color, and Content (2000, sec. 6.2) Tye grants Block’s content shift and bites the bullet on phenomenal character: character shifts gradually in synch with content, so the two never dissociate.16 This book reaches the same first-order verdict on its own externalist and comparative grounds. It adds two supports the reply needs to stand alone: externalism about memory content (illustrated by Tye’s Thatcher case and generalized here), and the cumulative wide-content argument of Chapters 4–6. Neither support makes the structural rival incoherent; they explain why the book chooses the synch-shift route while admitting that Inverted Earth does not independently decide the choice. The rival representationalist route (evolutionary/optimal-conditions anchoring, on which the experience goes on representing blue and simply misrepresents forever) is the one Block separately states and resists, and the one this book declines (Section 5.1); its home is the Dretske–Millikan tradition of historical content-fixing. The convergence with Tye concerns this case, not the book’s general authority or later metaphysics. The interesting result is that a teleosemantic view need not take the anchoring route — consumer-history semantics lets addresses re-tune, the same feature that resolves Swampman. Harman (1990) and Moore (1903) supply the transparency lineage the deeper move leans on; Lycan’s tracking representationalism is a close ally that fixes content by causal-historical covariation and so shares the historical-anchoring instinct the declined route runs on, though Lycan and Tye differ on the fine structure of the content-fixing relation.17 Chalmers (1996) reads the inverted-spectrum family sympathetically as evidence that phenomenal character outruns physical-functional description, and so sits on Block’s side of the line.18 Crane maps the conceptual terrain and treats Inverted Earth as a central battleground in the qualia-realism dispute.19

A later disagreement belongs in the open. Tye’s 2021 account distinguishes sharp, fundamental consciousness from the determinate phenomenal character supplied by representational content; his 2024 restatement presses the sharpness of phenomenal consciousness and adds a transfer account for complex subjects.20 Neither posit is an idle wheel in the narrow sense used against Block: consciousness is assigned the work of grounding that there is phenomenality at all. The book rejects the account elsewhere, for different reasons. It disputes the inference from our inability to imagine borderline consciousness to sharpness in nature, and it argues that the transfer from fundamental bearers to a globally organized subject remains primitive. Chapter 10 makes that comparison against the book’s own costly alternative, the strong a posteriori identity defended in Chapters 6 and 11. Agreement on Inverted Earth therefore supplies no authority on the later metaphysics; the arguments part where the positions do.

8. Residuals and limits

What the book concedes, plainly:

  • The doxastic shift is real — and the experiential shift too. Block is right that beliefs and color words re-anchor to the new environment, and the book grants that perceptual content follows, slowly, by the re-tuning of tracking. The first-order exchange is won or lost at premise (1), not premise (2).
  • The reply converges with Tye without belonging to him. The book takes the synch-shift route because its own externalism and explanatory comparison support it. Tye’s Thatcher case helps expose the memory issue; the resulting house view remains a defeasible extension of the wider identity argument rather than a deliverance of the thought experiment.
  • The cost is owned in the open. The reply says your phenomenal character inverted across decades and you could not have noticed. That remains a genuine revisionary cost, not an illusion produced only by belief in an inner dial. A structural representationalist can reject the shift without positing paint. The book accepts the cost because it keeps content and character under one wide individuation, not because transparency forced it.
  • Memory externalism is a commitment, not a proof. The reply’s stability rests on refusing memory an exemption from externalism. That refusal is principled (the exemption, not the refusal, would be ad hoc), but an opponent with introspectionist sympathies about memory will not be moved. The refusal is decisive only relative to the externalism and transparency the book argues independently.
  • The theoretical-role argument has a narrower result. The first-order reply denies that the dissociation occurs on the book’s wide theory. If the dissociation did occur, wide identity would fail, but mental paint would still not follow: a complete structural profile could fix character without an intrinsic residue. The book’s preference for the wide theory remains abductive and exposed rather than secured by the case itself.
  • The case’s native pull runs against the reply. A half-answered Inverted Earth is worse than none: the staging outshines the rebuttal unless the presentation stays deliberately disciplined.

Notes

  1. Ned Block, “Inverted Earth,” Philosophical Perspectives 4 (1990): 53–79, esp. 53–54; restated and extended in “Mental Paint,” in M. Hahn and B. Ramberg, eds., Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). The novelty over the classical inverted spectrum is the use of the representationalist’s own externalism to drive content and phenomenal character apart, rather than relying on a bare intuition of undetectable inversion. ↩
  2. The reconstruction follows Block 1990, pp. 62–64, and the presentation in Block 2003. The two coordinated inversions — objects and color vocabulary — are essential; without the vocabulary inversion the locals would simply contradict the traveler, and the scenario would not cohere. ↩
  3. Block grants the arrival-stage alignment explicitly (1990, pp. 63–64); the argument needs the temporal stage, where externalism has had time to act, and does no work at arrival. ↩
  4. The externalism is Putnam’s and Burge’s: Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215–271, esp. 223–27. Block’s dialectical point is that the representationalist cannot reject the externalism without abandoning the naturalistic account of content that motivates representationalism in the first place. ↩
  5. “Mental paint” is Block’s term for intrinsic, non-representational phenomenal properties of experience; see Block 2003, esp. 165–66, and, for the access/phenomenal framing it leans on, “On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995): 227–247, esp. 227–30. ↩
  6. Michael Tye, Consciousness, Color, and Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), sec. 6.2, “Biting the Bullet on the Inverted Earth Objection.” Tye writes that he will “grant Block’s assertion that with the move to Inverted Earth, representational [content changes]” — i.e., he concedes premise (2) and answers by denying premise (1). ↩
  7. The synch-shift reply — phenomenal character changing gradually in step with content, so that the two never dissociate and the change escapes the subject’s notice — was pressed against Block by William Lycan (Consciousness and Experience, 1996) before Tye adopted it; Block had anticipated the move himself (“Inverted Earth,” 68). Block characterizes and targets it in “Mental Paint” (2003), esp. 185–87: “The gradual shift of phenomenal character in sync with the gradual shift of representational content avoids any gap between them.” ↩
  8. Tye, Consciousness, Color, and Content (2000), sec. 6.2; the phenomenal-memory datum (“when, on Inverted Earth, I remember the clear sky of my youth, my phenomenal memory image is of the blue earthly sky”) is the standing pressure on the synch-shift reply. It records pinned reference, not preserved character: Tye holds in the same section that the image’s being of the blue earthly sky is “compatible with supposing that the color it represents the sky as having is yellow,” so that “phenomenally my memory of the sky matches my present visual experience” — the reconciliation Section 5.1 builds on. The Thatcher case supplies the pinning half (the image stays of the earthly Thatcher, whatever the subject now believes); the represents-as half re-tunes with perception’s content. Block’s complaint that externalism about memory amounts to an ad hoc error theory is in “Mental Paint” (2003); Chapter 6 states the answer in brief — the full exchange lives here. ↩
  9. On color as objective surface-reflectance-type — the color realism the book defends — see Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, “Color Realism and Color Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (2003): 3–21. Reflectance realism itself is neutral between the two representationalist routes: on either, experiential content fixes on objective reflectance-types; the routes differ only on whether the type a state tracks can re-anchor with the creature’s history. The declined route reads the tracking relation as pinned by design and calibration; the book’s consumer semantics lets it re-tune (Section 6, Objection 1). ↩
  10. Block, “Mental Paint” (2003), esp. 188–89, reporting the rival evolutionary-anchoring view (which he attributes to Dretske, Tye, and Burge) in order to resist it: “color representation is a product of evolution, hence if the sky on Inverted Earth continues to produce the same phenomenal experience in our traveler, it also is represented as blue.” This is the route the book declines (Section 5.1) — though for the book’s own reasons, not Block’s: his resistance runs through perceptual adaptation; the book’s runs through a semantics whose addresses were never frozen in the first place, plus the idle price of a lifetime of consequence-free misrepresentation. ↩
  11. Gilbert Harman, “The Intrinsic Quality of Experience,” Philosophical Perspectives 4 (1990): 31–52, esp. 39; G. E. Moore, “The Refutation of Idealism,” Mind 12 (1903): 433–453, esp. 446, for the diaphanousness observation; Michael Tye, “Representationalism and the Transparency of Experience,” Noûs 36 (2002): 137–151, esp. secs. 2–3. ↩
  12. The “smaller room” is the point: relocating the residue from a sense-datum to a bare phenomenal property does not exempt it from the demand that a posited item do some work. Cf. the anti-reification methodology — mental terms name relations and processes, not inner objects. ↩
  13. Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984); Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). The two anchor content historically in different ways, and the difference is what Objection 1 turns on: Millikan’s proper functions are etiological, fixed by selectional ancestry, while Dretske’s indicator functions are recruited and revisable within a creature’s own learning history (Explaining Behavior [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988], chs. 4–5). The declined route leans on the first reading; the book’s semantics runs on the second, supplemented by Millikan’s consumer side (Chapter 15) — which is why it can grant slow experiential re-anchoring without surrendering teleosemantics. ↩
  14. Block, “Mental Paint” (2003), esp. 171–73; the awareness-without-attention cases and the limits of introspective absence are deployed against the transparency theorist’s appeal. ↩
  15. Block 2003, esp. 165–66 and 184–89. The inverted-spectrum and Inverted-Earth cases are presented as cumulatively establishing that intentional content underdetermines phenomenal character. ↩
  16. Tye, Consciousness, Color, and Content (2000), sec. 6.2 (full citation above). This is the published reply with which the book’s independently argued synch-shift account converges (Section 5.1); the experiential no-shift view is the etiological-anchoring rival the book declines, not the reply of CCC sec. 6.2, and the two should not be run together. ↩
  17. William G. Lycan, Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). On the tracking-representationalist family (Lycan, Dretske, Tye) and its shared reliance on causal-historical content-fixing, see Lycan, “Representational Theories of Consciousness,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩
  18. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 3, sec. 2, on the coherence of inverted spectra. ↩
  19. Tim Crane, “The Origins of Qualia,” in Tim Crane and Sarah Patterson, eds., History of the Mind-Body Problem (London: Routledge, 2000), 169–194. Crane treats Inverted Earth as a focal case in the qualia/representationalism dispute. ↩
  20. Tye announced the panpsychist turn in Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness: Through the Looking Glass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), distinguishing sharp fundamental consciousness from the determinate, representationally fixed forms of consciousness that may inherit vagueness. He restated and revised the case for a general audience in “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Panpsychism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 31, no. 9–10 (2024): 10–28: the sharpness argument appears at 13–20, and the consciousness/content plus global-workspace transfer proposal at 20–24. The two presentations belong to one evolving view but should not be collapsed into the simple claim that all ordinary consciousness is sharp. ↩