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with, after all, is the moral character of the God of the Hebrew Bible , and its authors do not leave us in the dark about the reasons for genocide. It is saidto be a way of preventing the Israelites from marrying Canaanites and joining

them in the worship of their gods. This reason is not beyond our ken(p. 169). And we know not only that this is not a good reason for genocide, itis a bad reason. In defence of sceptical theism (p. 175), Mark Murphy responds that we should distinguish between ordinary reasons that we giveto one another in justifying our conduct and complete reasons. The Hebrew Bible reports Gods ordinary reasons for exterminating peoples, which is thegeneral wickedness of the Jerichoites (the people with whom Murphy isconcerned), and we do not have much of a clue about what Gods completereason would look like.

As can be seen from the above summary of Divine Evil , the book contains avariety of theistic approaches to dealing with the problem of divine evil. Oneissue not yet mentioned concerns the general line of response put forth by Stump and teased out in different ways by Plantinga, van Inwagen, andWolterstorff. If this line of response is right, then ordinary people aregoing to have an extremely difcult time understanding just what the mean-ing of the Hebrew Bible is at different points (see Antony, p. 56). If you needa scholarly community that labours for centuries (millennia?) over Hebrew texts to ascertain what their true sense and purpose is (labour needed, at leastin part, because God is represented as authorizing conduct that He really didnot authorize), what, if any, hope can the lay reader have of understandingwhat is going on? However this question is answered (and one might wonderwhether it would really be all that bad if the lay person had to depend uponscholarly expertise?), any person interested in the question of divine evil willnd Divine Evil a fascinating read. Whatever one makes of divine evil, thisbook most certainly promotes the human good.

STEWART GOETZDepartment of Philosophy Ursinus College Collegeville, PAUSAdoi:10.1093/mind/fzs 107 Advance Access publication 21 November 2012

Consciousness, Function, and Representation: Collected Papers ,by Ned Block. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007. Pp. 786. H/b 24.95, P/b55.95.

Ned Block believes in mental paint. He is also inclined to believe in mentaloil. That is, he believes that the phenomenal character of experiences, what itis like to have experiences, cannot be completely captured by functional orrepresentational facts, or by facts about cognition. An experience involves

Mind, Vol. 121 . 483 . July 2012 Mind Association 2012

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mental paint if it represents, but, like paint, has a nature that goes beyondwhat it represents. A plausible example: the phenomenal red in my visualexperience represents the red colour of surfaces, but the quality of phenom-

enal red what it is like to see red cannot be reduced to its representingthe red colour of surfaces. An experiences involves mental oil if it does notrepresent. Perhaps orgasms are a form of mental oil: pure what it is likenessunheeded by the task of mirroring the world.

Many of the essays in Blocks rst volume of collected papers Conscious-ness, Function and Representation argue in this direction, which gives hisdiverse work in philosophy of mind an overall unity and coherence.He argues in part using traditional thought experiments, offering us someof the most memorable and powerful thought experiments in philosophy.

Perhaps most notably, Block gives us the pleasure of contemplating the Chin-ese nation collectively replicating the functioning of the human brain, the aimof which is to show the possibility of something functionally indiscerniblefrom us but lacking phenomenal consciousness.

He also weaves an intriguing variant on Harmans Inverted Earth: aplanet where the colours of objects are inverted the sky is yellow, grassis red, re hydrants are green but the colour vocabulary of the residents isalso inverted they call the sky blue and grass green. In Blocks twist onthe story he asks you to imagine that you have been knocked out, had colour

inverting contact lenses inserted in your eyes, and been plonked onto invertedEarth. When you wake up, you will not notice the difference. The colourinverted lenses will make your experience of the yellow sky and the red grassindiscernible from your experience of sky and grass on Earth. And rememberthat the people on inverted Earth use the word blue to describe the sky andthe word green to describe the grass, so you would not be able to work out your situation from how locals talked. It seems that on Inverted Earth, at leastafter a little time has passed, you would have experiences phenomenologically indiscernible to those you had on Earth, despite the fact that what yourexperiences represent has changed: the experience which represented blueon Earth now represents yellow, the experience which represented green onEarth now represents red. Such a representational difference in the absence of a phenomenological difference entails the falsity of representationalism.

Block offers us some meta-philosophical advice on how to evaluate thephilosophical signicance of such thought experiments, which is summed upin the doctrine: Elicit simple intuitions about complex cases rather than complex intuitions about simple cases . Those who suggest that by attending to ourordinary, everyday experience, we can discover that we are unaware of any intrinsic properties of experience (i.e. experience is transparent) are outingthis doctrine, for they are seeking an answer to a highly complicated theor-etical question from a simple case. Blocks thought experiments, in contrast,take us into highly unusual situations, but then ask us for our simple re-sponses to them.


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However, it is not clear that the intuitions Block invokes in the abovethought experiments cannot be accommodated by his opponents. For ex-ample, Michael Tye has argued that a representationalist who grounds rep-

resentation in the naturally evolved functions of the organism can deny thatwhat my experiences represent changes when I move to Inverted Earth. Whatmy experiences represent is (very roughly) what they would be caused by in optimal circumstances , and those optimal circumstances are ones whichobtain in the environment in which I evolved, that is, on Earth rather thanInverted Earth. Therefore, my experience which represented blue on Earthcontinues to represent blue on Inverted Earth, precisely because it continuesto be the case that blue is what would cause that experience in optimalcircumstances (even if those optimal circumstances never again transpire

due to the fact that I am never returned to Earth).Compare: a speedometer which is tted to a car with the wrong tyre sizewill continue to misrepresent due to the fact that it is not in the situation itwas designed to be in in order to function properly. Of course this responseon behalf of the representationalist involves the potentially counterintuitiveclaim that I continue to systematically misrepresent colours for the rest of my life in exile on Inverted Earth, despite being by all outward appearances perfectly integrated into the community and well able to perfectly negotiatethe environment. The same would go for my heirs if I mate with another

immigrant from Earth.Block trades in real experiments as well as thought experiments, for ex-ample, appealing to actual variation in colour experience to argue againstrepresentationalism. In Sexism, Racism, Ageism and the Nature of Consciousness, he argues on empirical grounds that there are slight phe-nomenological variations in the colour experience of different genders andraces, and between people of different ages. If representationalism is true,then these slight variations correspond to slight differences in colour repre-sentation. And if there are such differences between how, say, a black manand a white man are representing the colour of a certain surface, it can not bethe case that both are representing the surface colour correctly: one must begetting it right and one must be getting it wrong (unless of course both aregetting it wrong). But it is implausibly chauvinistic to suppose that one racehas the privilege of veridically perceiving colours, from which Block infers theimplausibility of representationalism. Once we give up on representational-ism, we can take these slight phenomenal differences to be slightly differentways of representing the same facts.

Throughout the volume, a compelling case is made for the irreducibility of phenomenology to the functional/cognitive/representational. So far Blocksproject is one a dualist could enthusiastically support. But Block is resolutely committed to physicalism. Given his rejection of deationary analyses of phenomenology, his physicalism can take only one form: a posteriori iden-tities between phenomenal states and neuro-physiological states of the brain.


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Phenomenal states have a hidden (as in not revealed a priori) scienticnature; empirical investigation is needed to reveal the neuro-physiologicalessence of phenomenal qualities.

Block defends this conception of physicalism, commonly known as a pos-teriori physicalism (or type-B physicalism in David Chalmerss termin-ology) in a long, very detailed, quite challenging chapter Max BlacksObjection to Mind-Body Identity. Ultimately, Block thinks that the standardarguments against a posteriori physicalism are dependent on the thesis thatphenomenal properties are thin, that is, that they lack a hidden nature. Herejects the idea that the a priori availability of phenomenal properties, or thefact that phenomenal properties are available to the rst person, entails thatphenomenal properties are thin. When employing a phenomenal concept the

phenomenal property which is a physical property is a priori available,is in some sense used as its own mode of presentation, and yet in serving thisrole it does not present itself as a physical property.

Block tells us that phenomenal properties are not thin, but he does not tellus exactly how fat he takes them to be. Are they obese , hiding all their nature?Or are they on the chubby side , revealing something but not everything abouttheir nature? The former option is implausible: we can know a priori muchabout essential resemblances and differences between our phenomenal states,for example, that phenomenal red resembles phenomenal orange more than

it resembles phenomenal green (the fact that this proposition is a priori isrevealed by the fact that its negation is inconceivable).What account can the a posteriori physicalist give of this a priori know-

ledge? The dualist can claim that a subject stands in a special epistemically intimate relationship with her phenomenal qualities, commonly known asacquaintance, such that the nature of those qualities is directly revealed toher. By attending to phenomenal red and phenomenal orange, the nature of each is directly revealed, and hence it is apparent to the subject that they havea similar nature. And yet this seems to imply that phenomenal qualities arethin after all, given that their nature is directly revealed to the subject whenshe attends to them.

The a posteriori physicalist cannot accept this: if the nature of phenomenalred were physical, and that physical nature were directly revealed to us inintrospection, it would be a priori that phenomenal red is physical, which isinconsistent with the a posteriori physicalists contention that the physicaland the phenomenal are conceptually distinct. It would be helpful to hearfrom Block exactly how he proposes to account for our a priori knowledge of essential resemblances amongst phenomenal qualities, without relying on acommitment to acquaintance which is inconsistent with a posterioriphysicalism.

Making sense of a posteriori physicalism is crucial for Blocks project,which perhaps makes it a little strange that only one (admittedly long) chap-ter of the volume is spent defending it. For if a posteriori physicalism cannot


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be made sense of, then Blocks extensive work in attacking functionalist andrepresentationalist reductions of qualia amounts to extensive work in defenceof dualism, by ruling out deationary forms of reduction. If a posteriori

physicalism is false, then the mental paint which Block defends so wellturns out to be non-physical paint.

PHILIP GOFFDepartment of Philosophy University of Liverpool Liverpool, L69 7WY UK [email protected] doi:10.1093/mind/fzs 100 Advance Access publication 21 November 2012

Assertion: New Philosophical Essays , edited by Jessica Brown andHermanCappelen. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2011. Pp. 300. H/b39.00.

Brown and Cappelens volume collects papers presented at a conference heldat the Arche Research Centre in June 2007 . The issues addressed in thisvolume have generated much discussion in recent years, and the contribu-tions represent the state of the art. Brown and Cappelen offer an excellentintroduction which lays out the dialectical space, and which explains thedivision of papers into those which address the nature of assertion (Part I,with papers from Cappelen, Max Ko lbel, John MacFarlane, Peter Pagin, andRobert Stalnaker) and those which concern epistemic norms of assertion(Part II, with papers from Brown, Sanford Goldberg, Patrick Greenough,Jonathan Kvanvig, Jennifer Lackey, and Ishani Maitra).

The contributions begin with Cappelens compelling challenge to the very idea of assertion. If his argument is sound, it problematizes much of whatfollows. Cappelen argues that the notion of assertion should be abandoned infavour of the (uncontroversial) notion of saying : the saying of p is the act of expressing the proposition that p (p. 23) On his view [s]ayings are governedby variable norms, none of which is essential to, or constitutive of, the act of saying (p. 22).

Compare Timothy Williamsons view that assertion is essentially governed by:

Knowledge rule One must: Assert p only if one knows p. (p. 3)

But not all theories of assertion appeal to constitutive norms (pp. 24, p. 27).Other possibilities include theories that appeal to distinctive causes of asser-tion (assertion as an attempt to change the conversational score, assertion asthe expression of belief ) and theories that appeal to distinctive commitments


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