Book Review Consciousness*

Hill was a central-state materialist who kicked qualia upstairs into the brain. In this important and engaging book, he converts to externalist representationalism, kicking qualia downstairs into the extracranial world where they seem to reside. All awareness 'constitutively involves representations' (69); and 'the phenomenal character of an experience is the set of qualia that the experience represents as instantiated by objects of awareness' (148). Like others, Hill views representationalism as providing a route to reducing experience. He reduces qualia to physical properties of external objects and bodily regions. Without providing a detailed reductive theory of representation , he sometimes assumes that experiences represent such properties by having the function of causally co-varying with them (149, n. 16; 179–80). Let me say at the outset that Hill provides one of the most impressive defences of externalist representationalism to date. He breaks new ground on too many issues to address in a short review. I will focus on his case for representationalism and his representationalist views on the perception of space and pain, leaving to the side his interesting (and often convincing) discussions of introspection, emotion and the explanatory gap. Hill's primary argument for representationalism is that it alone comports with cognitive science, which has it that perception involves the manipulation of inner (perhaps subpersonal) 'representations' (70). But he doesn't explain why anti-representationalists (central-state materialists, Peacocke-style sensationalists, disjunc-tivists) cannot agree with cognitive science. Indeed, in principle, why couldn't they agree with Hill that awareness of external objects supervenes on and 'constitutively involves' the right kind of causal adjustment between the representations and the external objects? However, Hill raises forceful additional arguments against anti-representationalist views. For instance, against adverbialism, he says that the characteristics constituting phenomenology 'belong to the [external] objects of aware-ness', not internal states (86). Presumably, this Harman-style transparency intuition partly explains his conversion from central-state materialism to representationalism. Hill's discussion of spatial perception takes the discussion to a new level. He aims to account for the fact that the apparent size and shape of a penny (for instance) vary with distance and orientation. He rejects the view (defended by Peacocke and Lycan) that at some level a tilted penny is simply presented as elliptical. In effect he objects that it falsely predicts that we should believe it to be elliptical (143). I wondered why the proponent could not reply that we rarely attend to this level of content (along the …