Michel, M. (2019). The mismeasure of consciousness: A Problem of coordination for the Perceptual Awareness Scale. Philosophy of Science, 86(5), 1239–1249. doi:10.1086/705509
[Abstract]As for most measurement procedures in the course of their development, measures of consciousness face the problem of coordination, i.e., the problem of knowing whether a measurement procedure actually measures what it is intended to measure. I focus on the case of the Perceptual Awareness Scale to illustrate how ignoring this problem leads to ambiguous interpretations of subjective reports in consciousness science. In turn, I show that empirical results based on this measurement procedure might be systematically misinterpreted.
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 2 Consciousness science and the problem of coordination
Subsection 2.2 The PAS and the phenomenological fallacy
* To understand this distinction, it is useful to go back to what Place (1956) called the ‘phenomenological fallacy’: the error of concluding that properties of experienced contents are properties of experiences themselves. As Smart (1959) wrote against a similar mistake: "Trees and wallpapers can be green, but not the experience of seeing or imagining a tree or wallpaper" (p.151). The same thing goes for clarity, intensity or precision: the contents of consciousness are clear, vague, intense or precise. But consciousness of these contents itself is neither clear nor unclear, it is not intense nor precise. To attribute intensity and precision to consciousness itself is to commit the phenomenological fallacy. Rosenthal (2018) made this point clear:
Though variation in intensity of the content of a perception and in strength of awareness of the perception both affect overall experiential intensity, only variation that is due to the second source is strictly speaking a gradation of consciousness. It is plain that perceptual content can vary altogether independently of consciousness. Variation in intensity of perceptual content is not gradation of consciousness. One would think otherwise only on a theory that assimilates perceptual consciousness to the content of the perception, and so fails to distinguish subjective awareness of psychological states from the states themselves. (p.7)