Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge
January 1, 2007
David J. Chalmers
95 citations
Some philosophers deny any gap between physical processes and consciousness, others expect it to close, and some see it as a real divide in nature. This chapter explores a different view: the gap arises from how we think about consciousness, specifically from the relationship between our concepts of physical processes and our concepts of consciousness, not from the things themselves.
Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge
January 1, 2007
Daniel Dennett
91 citations
Daniel Dennett argues against the intuition that Mary gains new knowledge when she leaves her black-and-white room and sees color for the first time, a position he first presented in his 1991 book, Consciousness Explained. He contends that this intuition arises from failing to fully appreciate what it means to know all the physical facts. Dennett criticizes defenses of the intuition, devises variations of the Mary case to show how one might deduce what it is like to see in color from physical information, and defends his arguments against objections. He concludes that a proper understanding of phenomenal concepts and knowledge demonstrates there is no epistemic gap.
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.
Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge
January 1, 2007
Torin Alter
52 citations
The knowledge argument challenges physicalism—the view that the world is entirely physical—by claiming there are facts about consciousness not deducible from complete physical truths. Frank Jackson, who originally formulated the argument, later rejected it, arguing that sensory experience should be understood as representationalism (or intentionalism), where phenomenal states are merely representational states. This chapter contends that Jackson's representationalist response fails. Physicalists still face a representationalist version of the knowledge argument that retains the original's force; reformulating the challenge in representationalist terms does little to help physicalists answer it.
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.