Phenomenal Concepts and the Materialist Constraint
Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge January 1, 2007 Joseph Levine 63 citations
Physicalism holds that everything, including consciousness, can be explained in physical terms. This chapter argues that the 'phenomenal concept strategy'—which tries to close the explanatory gap between physical descriptions and subjective experience by appealing to special concepts we have of our own mental states—faces a serious problem. For such accounts to work, they must not rely on any basic, unexplained mental relation, such as a primitive notion of acquaintance between a person and her brain states. The author contends that it is unclear how any physicalist account can meet this requirement while still explaining how the explanatory gap arises from phenomenal concepts. The possibility is raised that physicalism may be false not because phenomenal properties are non-physical, but because our relation to them is brute and irreducible to physical relations.