1 To appear in Analysis Reviews in a symposium on David Chalmers’s The Contents of Consciousness, Oxford 2010. Page numbers refer to this volume. Are there Edenic grounds of perceptual intentionality? * The essays in “The Character of Consciousness” sketch a comprehensive theory of intentionality, aimed at explaining how linguistic items and mental states get their contents. The framework of two-dimensional semantics includes the thesis that sentences, beliefs, and experiences each have two sets of contents, and an explanation of the underlying dispositions that ground those contents. The contents take the form of two intensions. Primary intensions correspond to the cognitive significance of the utterance, belief, or experience, while secondary intensions correspond to environmental aspects of their meaning. In the case of experience, the two-dimensional framework is supplemented with a story about the role of phenomenal character in grounding the contents of experience. Every phenomenal aspect of experience finds expression in the framework of representation, in the form of a satisfaction condition. Experiences of objects have one type of satisfaction condition, experiences of properties have another, and when combined, they produce conditions on veridicality of experiences – not just visual experiences, but experiences in all sensory modalities, including bodily sensations. The phenomenal character of experiences is thus deeply connected to representation. “Intentional content appears to be part of phenomenology: part of the essential nature of phenomenology is that it is directed outward at a world (371).” In fact, according to Chalmers, phenomenology is systematically connected to intentional content twice over. And here Chalmers’s discussion of the phenomenal grounds of representation contains two independently motivated ideas. The first idea is that phenomenal character, all by itself, determines a unique profile of properties that the world would have to instantiate, in order for it to be the way it appears. For any experience, we can ask: how would the world have to be, in order to be precisely the way it is experienced? The idea that this question always has an answer is the conceit of Eden, a mythical place that embodies the perfect match between things in the world and our experiences of them. In Eden, things mirror how they appear, by having exactly the properties that they appear to have. The mythical construct of Eden vividly illustrates a set of constraints on veridicality placed by phenomenal character. Eden shows us what the world would be like, if the constraints placed by phenomenal character were fully met. The constraints are that things have perfect properties, which by definition mirror phenomenal character. Chalmers argues that our world is not Eden, because (for the most part) perfect properties * For discussion thanks to David Bennett, Ned Block, Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Eric Mandelbaum, Farid Masrour, Nico Silins, Maja Spener, Daniel Stoljar, and Scott Sturgeon.