Abstract

Let me begin by pointing out a number of potential misunderstandings in Pierre Livet’s densely written commentary. In the first paragraph, Pierre Livet writes, “phenomenal transparency involves an implication of the existence of the entities represented”. This is what I call the “extensionality equivocation”. As explained at length in BNO, “phenomenal transparency” has been a technical term in philosophy at least since G. E. Moore’s paper The Refutation of Idealism. In BNO, I offered a refined notion of the concept. I also discussed at length that there are at least three other well-defined notions of “transparency” in the literature: epistemic transparency, referential transparency, and transparency as a property of information channels. I will not repeat myself here, but simply point out that the implication towards the existence of entities mentioned in certain sentences is a property of extensional contexts – and not, as Livet writes, of phenomenally transparent states. Let me quote from BNO, “transparency as a property of contexts is not what I am talking about here”. I assume that Livet’s first misunderstanding comes from the interesting analogy between sentences constituting extensional contexts and fully transparent phenomenal representations, which I drew attention to on the very same page.