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Phenomenal concepts and the explanatory gap

In Torin Andrew Alter & Sven Walter (eds.), Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. New York, US: Oxford University Press (2006)

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  1. How can you be so sure? Illusionism and the obviousness of phenomenal consciousness.François Kammerer - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (9):2845-2867.
    Illusionism is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, but merely seems to exist. Many opponents to the thesis take it to be obviously false. They think that they can reject illusionism, even if they conceded that it is coherent and supported by strong arguments. David Chalmers has articulated this reaction to illusionism in terms of a “Moorean” argument against illusionism. This argument contends that illusionism is false, because it is obviously true that we have phenomenal experiences. I argue (...)
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  • The Integrated Information Theory facing the Hard problem of consciousness.Wael Basille - 2020 - Dissertation, Sorbonne Université
    The Integrated Information Theory (IIT) formulated for the first time in 2004 by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, is a theoretical framework aiming to scientifically explain phenomenal consciousness. The IIT is presented in the first part of this work. Broadly speaking, integrated information is an abstract quantitative measure of the causal power a system has on itself. The main claim of IIT is the identity between informational structures and experience. The nature of this identity will be the subject of the second (...)
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  • A Posteriori Physicalism and Introspection.Andreas Elpidorou - 2016 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97 (4):474-500.
    Introspection presents our phenomenal states in a manner otherwise than physical. This observation is often thought to amount to an argument against physicalism: if introspection presents phenomenal states as they essentially are, then phenomenal states cannot be physical states, for we are not introspectively aware of phenomenal states as physical states. In this article, I examine whether this argument threatens a posteriori physicalism. I argue that as along as proponents of a posteriori physicalism maintain that phenomenal concepts present the nature (...)
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  • A Dilemma about the Mental.Guy Dove & Andreas Elpidorou - 2021 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 1.
    Physicalism demands an explication of what it means for something to be physical. But the most popular way of providing one—viz., characterizing the physical in terms of the postulates of a scientifically derived physical theory—is met with serious trouble. Proponents of physicalism can either appeal to current physical theory or to some future physical theory (preferably an ideal and complete one). Neither option is promising: currentism almost assuredly renders physicalism false and futurism appears to render it indeterminate or trivial. The (...)
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  • Acquaintance.Matt Duncan - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (3):e12727.
    To be acquainted with something (in the philosophical sense of “acquainted” discussed here) is to be directly aware of it. The idea that we are acquainted with certain things we experience has been discussed throughout the history of Western Philosophy, but in the early 20th century it gained especially focused attention among analytic philosophers who drew their inspiration from Bertrand Russell's work on acquaintance. Since then, many philosophers—particularly those working on self‐knowledge or perception—have used the notion of acquaintance to explain (...)
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  • The obscurity of the physical: an objection to Chalmers’ conceivability argument.Felipe G. A. Moreira - 2020 - Filosofia Unisinos 21 (3):296-302.
    A zombie world is a possible world in which all the microphysical truths are identical to the truths in our world, but no one is phenomenally conscious. A zombie is an individual in a possible world whose microphysical truths are identical to the microphysical truths of an individual in our world, but who has none of the phenomenal conscious experiences of the individual in our world. An inverted is an individual in a possible world whose microphysical truths are not only (...)
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  • Whose Consciousness? Reflexivity and the Problem of Self-Knowledge.Christian Coseru - 2020 - In Mark Siderits, Ching Keng & John Spackman (eds.), Buddhist Philosophy of Consciousness: Tradition and Dialogue. Boston: Brill | Rodopi. pp. 121-153.
    If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for metacognition? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing (...)
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  • The global workspace theory, the phenomenal concept strategy, and the distribution of consciousness.Dylan Black - 2020 - Consciousness and Cognition 84:102992.
    Peter Carruthers argues that the global workspace theory implies there are no facts of the matter about animal consciousness. The argument is easily extended to other cognitive theories of consciousness, posing a general problem for consciousness studies. But the argument proves too much, for it also implies that there are no facts of the matter about human consciousness. A key assumption of the argument is that scientific theories of consciousness must explain away the explanatory gap. I criticize this assumption and (...)
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  • The Hard Problem Isn’t Getting any Easier: Thoughts on Chalmers’ “Meta-Problem”.Ben White - 2020 - Philosophia 49:495-506.
    Chalmers’ meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining “problem reports”; i.e. reports to the effect that phenomenal consciousness has the various features that give rise to the hard problem. Chalmers suggests that solving the meta-problem will likely “shed significant light on the hard problem.” Against this, I argue that work on the meta-problem will likely fail to make the hard problem any easier. For each of the main stances on the hard problem can provide an account of problem reports, (...)
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  • Liberal phenomenal concepts.Benjamin D. Storer - 2020 - Philosophical Explorations 23 (2):95-111.
    In this paper, I offer a third way in debates over the scope of phenomenal consciousness, in the form of a novel synthesis of liberal and conservative introspective observations. My primary claim i...
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  • Debunking Arguments for Illusionism about Consciousness.David Chalmers - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (5-6):258-281.
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  • Acquiring a Concept of Visual Experience.Austin Andrews - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (279):223-245.
    The transparency of visual experience is a widely held and important thesis in the philosophy of perception. Critical discussion of transparency has focused on visual experiences, such as the experience of visual blur that are taken to be counter examples to transparency. Here, I consider a novel objection to transparency that does not depend on intuitions about examples. The objection is that if transparency is true then we cannot explain our ability to think about our visual experiences as such. In (...)
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  • Phenomenal Concepts and Physical Facts: A Dialogue with Mary.Tufan Kiymaz - 2019 - Filozofia 74 (10):797-807.
    This is a dialogue between an opponent of the phenomenal concept strategy and Mary from Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument. In this dialogue, Mary, who has complete physical knowledge about what it is like to see red, but has never seen red, is a physicalist and she defends the phenomenal concept strategy against her interlocutor’s objections. In the end, none of them is able to convince the other, but their conversation, through considerations of different versions of the knowledge argument and different (...)
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  • Naturalizing Qualia.Alessandra Buccella - 2017 - Phenomenology and Mind 12:152 - 161.
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  • Space Emergence in Contemporary Physics: Why We Do Not Need Fundamentality, Layers of Reality and Emergence.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2018 - Disputatio 10 (49):71-95.
    ‘Space does not exist fundamentally: it emerges from a more fundamental non-spatial structure.’ This intriguing claim appears in various research programs in contemporary physics. Philosophers of physics tend to believe that this claim entails either that spacetime does not exist, or that it is derivatively real. In this article, I introduce and defend a third metaphysical interpretation of the claim: reductionism about space. I argue that, as a result, there is no need to subscribe to fundamentality, layers of reality and (...)
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  • The illusion of conscious experience.François Kammerer - 2019 - Synthese 198 (1):845-866.
    Illusionism about phenomenal consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, even though it seems to exist. This thesis is widely judged to be uniquely counterintuitive: the idea that consciousness is an illusion strikes most people as absurd, and seems almost impossible to contemplate in earnest. Defenders of illusionism should be able to explain the apparent absurdity of their own thesis, within their own framework. However, this is no trivial task: arguably, none of the illusionist theories currently on (...)
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  • On Intrinsic Information Content of the Physical Mind in Quantized Space: Against Externalism.R. R. Poznanski, L. A. Cacha, M. A. Tengku, A. L. Ahmad Zubaidi, S. Hussain, J. Ali & J. A. Tuszynski - 2019 - Axiomathes 29 (2):127-137.
    If the physical mind is located in quantized space of the brain then how does the physical mind become the self? This remains an unresolved problem. It can be restated as how mental representations or mental states get their informational contents, and of doing so in terms of the natural functions brain states have? We call these natural brain functions not teleosemantic functions, but rather teleological functions. This is because teleosemantics portrays mental representations which must have informational contents that track (...)
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  • Dissolving type‐b physicalism.Helen Yetter-Chappell - 2017 - Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1):469-498.
    The majority of physicalists are type-B physicalists – believing that the phenomenal-physical truths are only knowable a posteriori. This paper aims to show why this view is misguided. The strategy is to design an agent who (1) has full general physical knowledge, (2) has phenomenal concepts, and yet (3) is wired such that she would be in a position to immediately work out the phenomenal-physical truths. I argue that this derivation yields a priori knowledge. The possibility of such a creature (...)
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  • Realism, Common Sense, and Science.Mario De Caro - 2015 - The Monist 98 (2):197-214.
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  • A Posteriori Physicalism and the Discrimination of Properties.Philip Woodward - 2018 - Acta Analytica 33 (1):121-143.
    According to a posteriori physicalism, phenomenal properties are physical properties, despite the unbridgeable cognitive gap that holds between phenomenal concepts and physical concepts. Current debates about a posteriori physicalism turn on what I call “the perspicuity principle”: it is impossible for a suitably astute cognizer to possess concepts of a certain sort—viz., narrow concepts—without being able to tell whether the referents of those concepts are the same or different. The perspicuity principle tends to strike a posteriori physicalists as implausibly rationalistic; (...)
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  • An Alternative Dialectical Picture of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy Debate: A Reply to Mabaquiao.Jeremiah Joven Joaquin - 2017 - Kritike 11 (1):10-33.
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  • Conceiving of Pain.Brendan O'Sullivan & Peter Hanks - 2008 - Dialogue 47 (2):351-376.
    In this article we aim to see how far one can get in defending the identity thesis without challenging the inference from conceivability to possibility. Our defence consists of a dilemma for the modal argument. Either “pain” is rigid or it is not. If it is not rigid, then a key premise of the modal argument can be rejected. If it is rigid, the most plausible semantic account treats “pain” as a natural-kind term that refers to its causal or historical (...)
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  • What We Can Learn about Phenomenal Concepts from Wittgenstein’s Private Language.Roberto Sá Pereira - 2016 - Nordic Wittgenstein Review 5 (2):125-152.
    This paper is both systematic and historical in nature. From a historical viewpoint, I aim to show that to establish Wittgenstein’s claim that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” there is an enthymeme in Wittgenstein’s private language argument overlooked in the literature, namely Wittgenstein’s suggestion that both perceptual and bodily experiences are _transparent_ in the relevant sense that one cannot point to a mental state and wonder “What is that?” From a systematic viewpoint, I aim to show (...)
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  • Conscious Experiences as Ultimate Seemings: Renewing the Phenomenal Concept Strategy.François Kammerer - 2016 - Argumenta 1 (2):233-243.
    The Phenomenal Concept Strategy is a popular strategy used to support physicalism in the realm of conscious experience. This Strategy accounts for dualist intuitions but uses the ways in which we think about our experiences to explain these intuitions in a physicalist framework, without any appeal to ontological dualism. In this paper, I will raise two issues related to the currently available versions of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. First, most of the theories belonging to the Phenomenal Concept Strategy posit that (...)
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  • Modals vs. Morals. Blackburn on Conceptual Supervenience. Dohrn - 2012 - GAP 8 Proceedings.
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  • The sensory basis of the epistemic gap: an alternative to phenomenal concepts.Peter Fazekas & Zoltán Jakab - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (8):2105-2124.
    The phenomenal character of conscious experience has long been regarded as the major problem for physicalist accounts of consciousness. In recent years, defenders of physicalism have typically been relying on the so-called Phenomenal Concept Strategy to avoid dualism. In this paper, we argue with PCS that cognitive-physicalistic explanations can account for the peculiarities of phenomenal character. However, we think that the conceptual features PCS investigates are not the genuine causes of the special characteristics of phenomenal consciousness but only symptoms, which (...)
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  • Conceptual Instability and the New Epistemic Possibility.Raamy Majeed - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (3):613-627.
    We tend to think that our concepts are stable in the sense that, whilst their extensions may vary across distinct epistemic scenarios, the reference-fixing conditions by which we discover these extensions remain fixed. This paper challenges this orthodoxy. In particular, it aims to motivate the position that some concepts are unstable in that their reference-fixing conditions themselves vary across distinct epistemic scenarios. Furthermore, it aims to draw out the implications such instability has for epistemic possibility and apriority. I shall argue (...)
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  • New Wave Pluralism.David Ludwig - 2013 - Dialectica 67 (4):545-560.
    The aim of this paper is to develop a pluralist interpretation of the phenomenal concept strategy (PCS). My starting point is Horgan and Tienson's deconstructive argument according to which proponents of PCS face the following dilemma: either phenomenal concepts or physical concepts allow us to conceive phenomenal states as they are in themselves. If phenomenal concepts allow us to conceive phenomenal states as they are in themselves, then phenomenal states are non-physical states and physicalism is wrong. If physical concepts allow (...)
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  • Self-Representationalism and the Neo-Russellian Ignorance Hypothesis: A Hybrid Account of Phenomenal Consciousness.Tom McClelland - 2012 - Dissertation, Sussex
    This thesis introduces the Problem of Consciousness as an antinomy between Physicalism and Primitivism about the phenomenal. I argue that Primitivism is implausible, but is supported by two conceptual gaps. The ‘–tivity gap’ holds that physical states are objective and phenomenal states are subjective, and that there is no entailment from the objective to the subjective. The ‘–trinsicality gap’ holds that physical properties are extrinsic and phenomenal qualities are intrinsic, and that there is no entailment from the extrinsic to the (...)
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  • A defense of the knowledge argument.John Martin DePoe - unknown
    Defenders of the Knowledge Argument contend that physicalism is false because knowing all the physical truths is not sufficient to know all the truths about the world. In particular, proponents of the Knowledge Argument claim that physicalism is false because the truths about the character of conscious experience are not knowable from the complete set of physical truths. This dissertation is a defense of the Knowledge Argument. Chapter one characterizes what physicalism is and provides support for the claim that if (...)
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  • Two Problems with the Socio-Relational Critique of Distributive Egalitarianism.Christian Seidel - 2013 - In Miguel Hoeltje, Thomas Spitzley & Wolfgang Spohn (eds.), Was dürfen wir glauben? Was sollen wir tun? Sektionsbeiträge des achten internationalen Kongresses der Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie e.V. DuEPublico. pp. 525-535.
    Distributive egalitarians believe that distributive justice is to be explained by the idea of distributive equality (DE) and that DE is of intrinsic value. The socio-relational critique argues that distributive egalitarianism does not account for the “true” value of equality, which rather lies in the idea of “equality as a substantive social value” (ESV). This paper examines the socio-relational critique and argues that it fails because – contrary to what the critique presupposes –, first, ESV is not conceptually distinct from (...)
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  • The conceivability argument and the intuition of dualism.Karol Polcyn - 2010 - Diametros 24:90-106.
    Kripke’s antimaterialist argument, under David Papineau’s new interpretation, is not based on assuming that the conceivability of zombies entails possibility and does not lead to the conclusion that materialism is false but rather to the conclusion that we are all in the grip of the intuitive feeling that materialism is false. Leaving it open whether or not Papineau’s interpretation of Kripke’s argument is correct, I argue here that by appealing to the intuition of dualism we can see that the conceivability (...)
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  • Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Buddhist Thought.John Spackman - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (10):741-751.
    Recent years have seen a growing interest in Buddhist thought as a potential source of alternative conceptions of the nature of the mind and the relation between the mental and the physical. This article considers and assesses three different models of what contemporary philosophy of mind can learn from Buddhist thought. One model, advocated by Alan Wallace, holds that we can learn from Buddhist meditation that both individual consciousness and the physical world itself emerge from a deeper, “primordial” consciousness. A (...)
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  • Physicalism and Phenomenal Concepts.Erhan Demircioglu - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (1):257-277.
    Frank Jackson’s famous Knowledge Argument moves from the premise that complete physical knowledge is not complete knowledge about experiences to the falsity of physicalism. In recent years, a consensus has emerged that the credibility of this and other well-known anti-physicalist arguments can be undermined by allowing that we possess a special category of concepts of experiences, phenomenal concepts, which are conceptually independent from physical/functional concepts. It is held by a large number of philosophers that since the conceptual independence of phenomenal (...)
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  • Phenomenal Acquaintance.Kelly Trogdon - 2009 - Dissertation, Umass Amherst
    Chapter 1 is devoted to taking care of some preliminary issues. I begin by distinguishing those states of awareness in virtue of which we’re acquainted with the phenomenal characters of our experiences from those states of awareness some claim are at the very nature of experience. Then I reconcile the idea that experience is transparent with the claim that we can be acquainted with phenomenal character. -/- In Chapter 2 I set up a dilemma that is the primary focus of (...)
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  • In Defense of Phenomenal Concepts.Bénédicte Veillet - 2012 - Philosophical Papers 41 (1):97-127.
    Abstract In recent debates, both physicalist and anti-physicalist philosophers of mind have come to agree that understanding the nature of phenomenal concepts is key to understanding the nature of phenomenal consciousness itself. Recently, however, Derek Ball (2009) and Michael Tye (2009) have argued that there are no such concepts. Their case is especially troubling because they make use of a type of argument that proponents of phenomenal concepts have typically found persuasive in other contexts; namely, arguments much like those that (...)
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  • Intrinsic naturalism: a type-F monist account of phenomenal consciousness.Luke Alexander Gordon Palmer - unknown
    The aim of this thesis is to provide a theory of phenomenal consciousness which accords with both the science-friendly spirit of physicalism and the acknowledgement of panpsychism that phenomenal properties may be inextricably linked to entities, but with none of the problems associated with either type of model. Initially, physicalism and panpsychism are evaluated by the lights of their most serious problems, and solutions are offered to these problems from the point of view of a third kind of model: intrinsic (...)
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  • On The Infinitely Hard Problem Of Consciousness.Bernard Molyneux - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (2):211 - 228.
    I show that the recursive structure of Leibniz's Law requires agents to perform infinitely many operations to psychologically identify the referents of phenomenal and physical concepts, even though the referents of ordinary concepts (e.g. Hesperus and Phosphorus) can be identified in a finite number of steps. The resulting problem resembles the hard problem of consciousness in the fact that it appears (and indeed is) unsolvable by anyone for whom it arises, and in the fact that it invites dualist and eliminativist (...)
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  • Concepts and Perceptual Belief: How (Not) to Defend Recognitional Concepts.Bradley Rives - 2010 - Acta Analytica 25 (4):369-391.
    Recognitional concepts have the following characteristic property: thinkers are disposed to apply them to objects merely on the basis of undergoing certain perceptual experiences. I argue that a prominent strategy for defending the existence of constitutive connections among concepts, which appeals to thinkers’ semantic-cum-conceptual intuitions, cannot be used to defend the existence of recognitional concepts. I then outline and defend an alternative argument for the existence of recognitional concepts, which appeals to certain psychological laws.
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