Imagine yourself in an elevator. You press the button for the upmost floor when, all of a sudden, you smell something nauseating: a foul metallic odor permeates your nostrils and raises disgust until all your attention is focused (unfortunately) on this olfactory catastrophe. How it smells is not the question. The odor has a very determinate character—and it is funky! But what is it that you smell, what is this sensation about? Maybe you left a cheese sandwich in your pocket and forgot about it? Maybe some wiring went faulty? Or the breaks? Maybe your colleague cut one out? Even though you don’t know what it is you are experiencing—what your experience is about, its content, or representational aspect—, you do know how it is like to smell this stench—you know its appearance, its character, its configurational[1] or phenomenal aspects. What is the relation between content and character in such percepts?
Representationists give the following answer to this question: all phenomenal features of an experience (its appearance or character) are dependent on its representational features (its content): how you experience is determined by what you experience. Ned Block (forthcoming 2015)[2] has provided a useful way of taxonomizing Representationists further: Identity-Representationism (IR) is the claim that the character of an experience is nothing but its content. However, content here cannot be more basic than character, because identity is symmetrical. Character then determines content just as content determines character, because both are just one and the same. Also, if we want to explain or reduce character to content, then IR is not the way to go, because reduction—unlike identity—is asymmetric, and so is explanation.[3]
That an experience’s content is more basic and determines its character (but not vice versa) can be captured in two ways: Supervenience-Representationism (SR) is the claim that every change in phenomenal character necessitates a change in the content of the experience, but not vice versa. But SR leaves open which change in content determines a specific change in character. In Ground-Representationism (GR), however, not any change will do: the change in character must have a change in content that accounts for the change in character.
Say you experience a change in the size of a gap, e.g. it grows larger. If that experience’s character merely supervenes on its content, then the appearance of a growing gap does not necessitate that your experience is about a growing gap—something has to change in content, but it doesn’t need to be this specific change. This appearance may be brought about by a change from being about a gap of size x to a smaller gap of size y, or about the gap changing color, or about your toe starting to twitch while you look at the gap—any change might do without violating the letter of SR. However, if an experience’s character is grounded in its content, then the change in content must account for the appearance. It seems that only being about a growing gap truly accounts for the appearance of a growing gap. If we want to be Representationists, GR seems like our best option: it allows us to (i) differentiate content from character, (ii) see content as more basic than character, (iii) capture that phenomenal character is dependent on content, but not vice versa, and (iv) make content accountable for character.
However, character is not grounded in content, Block argues:[4] GR is false. This assessment is motivated by empirical considerations. There are many gems in Block’s article, but I will focus mainly on the crown jewel, which is the argument based on “phenomenal precision”. It is subtle and intricate, so my first step is to reconstruct it (with a bit of elaboration) in section 3. In section 4, I point to a few oddities and tensions I see with Block’s other work. I do not see these tensions as offering a decisive blow to his argument, but as a plea for an elaboration on how Block thinks about phenomenal precision. (My main argument meanders through the main text. I keep it concise, but some points deserve some technical elaboration—thus the abundance of footnotes. They may be treated like beetroot on a buffet, i.e. skipped with clean conscience.)