I am currently doing some revising of a chapter that includes a section on Malebranche's theory of sensation. I've dealt with some of it before, but things come across differently when you are trying to write about them than when you are trying casually to read them. One argument has struck my eye anew. Malebranche is arguing that we have good reason to think not everyone has the same sensations:
Suppose that there are twenty people, and that oen of them, who does not know the words used in France to indicate cold and warmth, has cold hands, and the others have extremely warm hands. If tepid water were brought to them during the winter for washing, those with warm hands, taking their turns to wash first, would say, this is very cold water, I do not like it at all. But when he with the very cold hands finally had his turn to wash, he would say, I do not know why you do not like cold water; for myself I find the sensation of cold water and washing in it quite pleasing.
It is quite clear in this example that when this fellow says, I like cold, it means nothing if nto that he likes warmth and that he feels warmth where others feel the opposite. (Search after Truth 1.13, LO 65)
Malebranche uses this as part of an argument arguing that, because no one's sensory organs are exactly the same, and since the dispositions of our sensory organs are correlated to our sensations by general laws, no one has exactly the same sensations. What struck me was the closeness of this to some discussions of qualia in more recent literature. Indeed, this whole notion of 'qualia' is an attempt to re-insert Cartesian modifications of the soul into philosophy of the mind; they are both "the way things seem to us."
It is worth noting, however, that Malebranche's 'modifications' are on very strong ground, because he does not rely on them, as qualia theorists often rely on qualia, to argue against reduction of mind to body. That is dealt with in a different set of arguments. Consider the arguments against qualia in Dennett's famous paper, Quining Qualia. (It will help if you refer back to the paper at each point.
Intuition pump #1: Watching You Eat Cauliflower. This sounds a lot like Malebranche, but unlike Dennett's qualia-advocates, he does not make his case on the basis of a stripping down to residuals, independently of how they are stimulated. On the contrary, his primary argument is that because they are stimulated in different ways, they (probably) have different modifications of the soul.
Intuition pump #2: The Wine-tasting Machine. The reason the wine-tasting machine cannot enjoy wine is that it has no soul; thought is not a modification of extension.
Intuition pump #3 & #4: These pro-qualia inverted spectrum stories can easily be accepted by Malebranche if they are correlated to changes in the sensory organs (this turns out to be significant later). Malebranche would have problems with #5 since it would suggest a denial of his conception of general laws, but could probably allow for something like it as a possibility.
I'm not sure precisely how Malebranche would deal with intuition pump #6 (alternative neurosurgery), but since he does not need an inverted spectrum story to argue for his position, and since his dualism is supported on other grounds, he would not be put out by it at all. In both cases all that's being fiddled with are the equivalent of what he would have called animal spirits in the brain. Malebranche would also consider Dennett a victim of what he lists as the first error about the passion of the soul in sensation: Dennett confuses the modification itself with the body-state correlated with it, and would reply to him, "a man cannot be entirely ignorant of what pain is when he feels it."
On Intuition pump #7, Malebranche would (I think) deny that, properly speaking, we can be wrong about our modifications; he would be unimpressed by Wittgensteinian arguments to the contrary. Whether he would be wrong on this would be too complex to go into here. Suffice it to say that Malebranche would not be scared off by a little changing in coffee tastes, particularly since he thinks he already knows why tastes change, and so would undoubtedly take Sanborn's side. There is perhaps some reason to give him at least a little benefit of the doubt on this, given that his choosing to take Sanborn's side would not be based exclusively on an attempt to give an account of qualia. I confess to having a bit of difficulty following what's supposed to be going on in intuition pump #8, so I'll skip that one. I suspect Malebranche would think it contravened general laws, but I'm not sure what precisely Dennett's going for in this one.
Intuition pump #9: Experienced Beer Drinker. As far as I see Malebranche has no problem with this on; at least I don't see how this would be a problem for him. Ditto on intuition pump #10, which he clearly would consider to be mired in another error pertaining to the passion of the soul, namely, considering the sensible qualities of things to be in the things.
Intuition pump #11: the cauliflower cure. Malebranche would deny this is a possible situation, given the way he argues for the differences of modifications of the soul.
Intuition pump #12 would be taken care of by general laws again.
Cerebral achromotopsia is, I think, easily handled by Malebranche's dualism, whatever the precise details. (And, indeed, I suspect the differences among qualia theorists Dennett notes has less to do with qualia than with different notions of the mind and its relation to the body, so this is perhaps not surprising.)
Malebranche would, again, be unimpressed by intuition pump #13, insofar as it is skeptical about things like modifications of the soul. He would attribute the difficulty of capturing the osprey cry in words to the limitations of our will; we can't call up sensations the way we can call up ideas at wills, so this limits the way we can use language to communicate things about them. He would disagree that it is a matter of informativeness, and would have nothing but contempt for Dennett's Jello box analogy, intuition pump #14. He would consider intuition pump #15 to be mired in one of the errors he identifies.
This is all rough-and-ready, and it has been years since last I even looked at Dennett's paper, so I might be a little off on Dennett. But I find it enlightening about Malebranche; I think he would agree with a great deal of David de Leon's paper on qualia.
