Online research in philosophy

During the last two decades, several different anti-physicalist arguments based on an epistemic or conceptual gap between the phenomenal and the physical have been proposed. The most promising physicalist line of defense in the face of these arguments – the Phenomenal Concept Strategy – is based on the idea that these epistemic and conceptual gaps can be explained by appeal to the nature of phenomenal concepts rather than the nature of non-physical phenomenal properties. Phenomenal concepts, on this proposal, involve unique cognitive mechanisms, but none that could not be fully physically implemented. David Chalmers has recently presented a Master Argument to show that the Phenomenal Concept Strategy – not just this or that version of it, but any version of it – fails. Chalmers argues that the phenomenal concepts posited by such theories are either not physicalistically explicable, or they cannot explain our epistemic situation with regard to qualia. I argue that it is his Master Argument that fails. My claim is his argument does not provide any new reasons to reject the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. I also argue that, although the Phenomenal Concept Strategy is successful in showing that the physicalist is not rationally compelled to give up physicalism in the light of the anti-physicalist arguments, the anti-physicalist is not rationally compelled to give up the anti-physicalist argument in the light of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy either.

Intuitions based on the first-person perspective can easily mislead us about what is and is not conceivable.1 This point is usually made in support of familiar reductionist positions on the mind-body problem, but I believe it can be detached from that approach. It seems to me that the powerful appearance of contingency in the relation between the functioning of the physical organism and the conscious mind -- an appearance that depends directly or indirectly on the first- person perspective -- must be an illusion. But the denial of this contingency should not take the form of a reductionist account of consciousness of the usual type, whereby the logical gap between the mental and the physical is closed by conceptual analysis -- in effect, by analyzing the mental in terms of the physical (however elaborately this is done -- and I count functionalism as such a theory, along with the topic-neutral causal role analyses of mental concepts from which it descends).

Machine generated contents note: Introduction Simone Gozzano and Christopher S. Hill; 1. Acquaintance and the mind-body problem Katalin Balog; 2. Identity, reduction, and conserved mechanisms: perspectives from circadian rhythm research William Bechtel; 3. Property identity and reductive explanation Ansgar Beckermann; 4. A brief history of neuroscience's actual influences on mind-brain reductionism John Bickle; 5. Type-identity conditions for phenomenal properties Simone Gozzano; 6. Locating qualia: do they reside in the brain or in the body and the world? Christopher S. Hill; 7. In defense of the identity theory Mark I Frank Jackson; 8. The very idea of token physicalism Jaegwon Kim; 9. About face: philosophical naturalism, the heuristic identity theory, and recent findings about prosopagnosia Robert McCauley; 10. On justifying neurobiologicalism for consciousness Brian McLaughlin; 11. The causal contribution of mental events Alyssa Ney; 12. Return of the zombies? John Perry; 13. Identity, variability, and multiple realization in the special sciences Lawrence Shapiro and Thomas Polger; Bibliography; Index.

There is an interesting and instructive problem with Richard Fumerton’s acquaintance theory of noninferential justification. Fumerton’s explicit account requires acquaintance with the truth-maker of one’s belief and yet he admits that one can have noninferential justification when one is not acquainted with the truth-maker of one’s belief but instead acquainted with a very similar truth-maker. On the face of it this problem calls for clarification. However, there are skeptical issues lurking in the background. This paper explores these issues by developing a dilemma for an acquaintance theory.

The mind-body problem in contemporary philosophy has two parts: the problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness. These two parts are not unrelated; in fact, it can be helpful to see them as two horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, the causal interaction between mental and physical phenomena seems to require that all causally efficacious mental phenomena are physical; but on the other hand, the phenomenon of consciousness seems to entail that not all mental phenomena are physical.2 One may avoid this dilemma by adopting an epiphenomenalist view of consciousness, of course; but there is little independent reason for believing such a view. Rejecting epiphenomenalism, then, leaves contemporary philosophers with their problem: mental causation inclines them towards physicalism, while consciousness inclines them towards dualism.

The mind-body problem concerns the relationship between mind and body, or nowadays - between mind or consciousness and the brain. As a relationship, this can be viewed from two perspectives: from body to mind and from mind to body. In this note I point out that the two readings of the problem are not symmetrical and that there are categorical differences between them. In particular, whereas the body to mind problem constitutes a mystery (cf. the contemporary hard problem), the mind to body problem may be approached from a psychological (as contrasted with philosophical) orientation that allows for concrete phenomenological investigation.

At the very heart of the mind-body problem is the question of the nature of consciousness. It is consciousness, and in particular _phenomenal_ consciousness, that makes the mind-body relation so deeply perplexing. Many philosophers hold that no defi nition of phenomenal consciousness is possible: any such putative defi nition would automatically use the concept of phenomenal consciousness and thus render the defi nition circular. The usual view is that the concept of phenomenal consciousness is one that must be explained by means of specifi c examples and associated comments.

While Russell’s concerns in developing the theory of descriptions were primarily with his foundation of logic, he was aware of the epistemological uses of both the theory of denoting concepts and the 1905 theory of deWnite descriptions. At the end of “On Denoting” he suggests that the principle of acquaintance is a “result” of the new theory of denoting. In this paper I examine the relation between the theory of descriptions and the principle of acquaintance, and I reject two suggestions, one that Russell’s view commits him to the position that quantiWers range only over objects of acquaintance, the other that the principle of acquaintance plays a crucial role in the Gray’s Elegy argument. Russell’s earlier theory of denoting concepts went hand in hand with the principle of acquaintance, as Russell made clear in his “Points about Denoting”. So the principle of acquaintance was neither a motivator for the new account nor a special consequence of it. The new account of “On Denoting”, while dispensing with denoting concepts, preserved the connection that the older de-.

This article is about the special, subjective concepts we apply to experience, called “phenomenal concepts”. They are of special interest in a number of ways. First, they refer to phenomenal experiences, and the qualitative character of those experiences whose metaphysical status is hotly debated. Conscious experience strike many philosophers as philosophically problematic and difficult to accommodate within a physicalistic metaphysics. Second, PCs are widely thought to be special and unique among concepts. The sense that there is something special about PCs is very closely tied up with features of the epistemic access they afford to qualia. When we deploy phenomenal concepts introspectively to some phenomenally conscious experience as it occurs, we are said to be acquainted with our own conscious experiences. Accounts of PCs either have to explain the acquaintance relation, or acquaintance with our phenomenal experiences has to be denied. PCs have received much attention in recent philosophy of mind mainly because they figure in arguments for dualism and in physicalist responses to these arguments. The main topic of this article is to explore different accounts of phenomenal concepts and their role in recent debates over the metaphysical status of phenomenal consciousness.

I will elaborate and defend a set of metaphysical and epistemic claims that comprise what I call the acquaintance approach to introspective knowledge of the phenomenal qualities of experience. The hallmark of this approach is the thesis that, in some introspective judgments about experience, (phenomenal) reality intersects with the epistemic, that is, with the subject’s grasp of that reality. In Section 1 of the paper I outline the acquaintance approach by drawing on its Russellian lineage. A more detailed picture of the approach emerges in succeeding sections, which respond to a range of objections. Some critics charge that approaches of this sort are overly idealized, in that they ignore the cognitive flaws and limitations of actual human beings. I begin to address these worries in Section 2, by arguing that the epistemic commitments of the acquaintance approach are in fact relatively modest. In Section 3, I sketch a picture of introspective reference that explains how phenomenal reality can intersect with the epistemic in a phenomenal judgment, as the acquaintance approach requires. Drawing on this picture of introspective reference, Section 4 sets out a practical strategy for achieving knowledge by acquaintance. Some contemporary acquaintance theorists (BonJour 2003, Fumerton 1996) employ demanding epistemic standards for knowledge by acquaintance, standards beyond those mandated by the acquaintance approach. In Section 5 I show that instances of introspective knowledge that meet less demanding standards can satisfy the acquaintance approach’s epistemic commitments. The final sections concern the most direct challenges to the acquaintance approach, which target the claim that phenomenal reality intersects with the epistemic. According to one such challenge, this claim is belied fact that possessing a phenomenal concept is a matter of having certain dispositions. Section 6 draws on a discussion by Sosa (2003) to articulate this challenge, and responds to it on behalf of the acquaintance approach. Section 7 addresses Stalnaker’s (2008) worry that, if phenomenal reality intersected with the epistemic, phenomenal information would be incommunicable.