Direct Reference and Dancing Qualia

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.

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Abstract

AbstractThis chapter argues that there is a tension in the semantic views held by certain antiphysicalists. These philosophers accept Fregean arguments against direct-reference theories of ordinary proper names but maintain that phenomenal concepts refer directly. Against this semantic package, it is argued that the thought experiments that motivate a sense-reference distinction for ordinary proper names — roughly, Hesperus-Phosphorus stories — can be replicated at the level of direct phenomenal concepts. (A Hesperus-Phosphorus story is one in which one rationally believes both that object a has a property P and that object b lacks P, even though a = b.)