Direct Reference and Dancing Qualia
Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge January 1, 2007 John Hawthorne 10 citations
Some antiphysicalist philosophers hold an inconsistent pair of semantic views: they accept Fregean arguments that ordinary proper names have both sense and reference, yet they maintain that phenomenal concepts (concepts of conscious experiences) refer directly, without a sense. This chapter argues that the thought experiments used to motivate a sense-reference distinction for ordinary names—specifically, Hesperus-Phosphorus stories where someone rationally believes contradictory things about what is actually the same object—can be replicated for direct phenomenal concepts. Therefore, the antiphysicalist semantic package is untenable.