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Summary Eliminativism about qualia is the view that qualia--at least as they are commonly and influentially understood--do not exist. Qualia eliminativists typically do not deny the existence of conscious experience, such as colour perception; however they deny that such experience involves the tokening of qualitative properties of mental states, such as the redness of red sensations. Qualia eliminativists often attack conceptions of qualia that involve committment to features that are prima facie problematic for naturalism about consciousness, such as qualia's putative intrinsicness, ineffability, privacy, or incorrigibility.
Key works The two philosophers most associated with qualia eliminativism are Daniel Dennett (Dennett 1988Dennett 1994) and Georges Rey (Rey 1986). Paul and Patricia Churchland have also argued strongly against most of our 'folk' understandings of mentality, including qualia (e.g. Churchland 1985).
Introductions Dennett 1991; Dennett 1991; Seager 1993; Garcia-Carpintero 2003Levine 1994
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  1. The defence of qualia.Edmond L. Wright - manuscript
    In view of the excellent arguments that have been put forth recently in favour of qualia, internal sensory presentations, it would strike an impartial observer - one could imagine a future historian of philosophy - as extremely odd why so many philosophers who are opposed to qualia, that is, sensory experiences internal to the brain, have largely ignored those arguments in their own. There has been a fashionable assumption that any theory of perception which espouses qualia has long since been (...)
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  2. Is the Mind a Magic Trick? Illusionism about Consciousness in the “Consciousness-Only” Theory of Vasubandhu and Sthiramati.Amit Chaturvedi - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (52):1495-1534.
    Illusionists about consciousness boldly argue that phenomenal consciousness does not fundamentally exist — it only seems to exist. For them, the impression of having a private inner life of conscious qualia is nothing more than a cognitive error, a conjuring trick put on by a purely physical brain. Some phenomenal realists have accused illusionism of being a byproduct of modern Western scientism and overzealous naturalism. However, Jay Garfield has endorsed illusionism by explicitly drawing support from the classical Yogācāra Buddhist philosopher (...)
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  3. What-it’s-like talk is technical talk.Erlend Owesen - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-18.
    It is common to characterise phenomenal consciousness as _what it is like_ to be in a mental state. This paper argues that the ‘what-it’s-like’-phrase in this context has a technical meaning, i.e. a meaning for which the association to the relevant expression is peculiar to a theoretical community. The relevant theoretical community is philosophy and some parts of cognitive science, so on this view, only philosophers and cognitive scientists use the ‘what-it’s-like’-phrase in the way that is characteristic in the literature (...)
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  4. Science and Philosophy of Color in the Modern Age.Jacob Browning & Zed Adams - 2021 - In Anders Steinvall & Sarah Streets (eds.), Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 21-38.
    The study of color expanded rapidly in the 20th century. With this expansion came fragmentation, as philosophers, physicists, physiologists, psychologists, and others explored the subject in vastly different ways. There are at least two ways in which the study of color became contentious. The first was with regard to the definitional question: what is color? The second was with the location question: are colors inside the head or out in the world? In this chapter, we summarize the most prominent answers (...)
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  5. Four Meta-methods for the Study of Qualia.Lok-Chi Chan & Andrew J. Latham - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (1):145-167.
    In this paper, we describe four broad ‘meta-methods’ employed in scientific and philosophical research of qualia. These are the theory-centred metamethod, the property-centred meta-method, the argument-centred meta-method, and the event-centred meta-method. Broadly speaking, the theory-centred meta-method is interested in the role of qualia as some theoretical entities picked out by our folk psychological theories; the property-centred meta-method is interested in some metaphysical properties of qualia that we immediately observe through introspection ; the argument-centred meta-method is interested in the role of (...)
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  6. The Normative Challenge for Illusionist Views of Consciousness.Francois Kammerer - 2019 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6.
    Illusionists about phenomenal consciousness claim that phenomenal consciousness does not exist but merely seems to exist. At the same time, it is quite intuitive for there to be some kind of link between phenomenality and value. For example, some situations seem good or bad in virtue of the conscious experiences they feature. Illusionist views of phenomenal consciousness then face what I call the normative challenge. They have to say where they stand regarding the idea that there is a link between (...)
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  7. Are We Causally Redundant?Jiri Benovsky - 2017 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1):1-8.
    Some friends of eliminativism about ordinary material objects such as tables or statues think that we need to make exceptions. In this article, I am interested in Trenton Merricks’ claim that we need to make an exception for us, conscious beings, and that we are something over and above simples arranged in suitable ways, unlike tables or statues. I resist this need for making an exception, using the resources of four-dimensionalism.
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  8. Odpovědi přátelům.Tomáš Hříbek - 2017 - Filosofie Dnes 9 (2):91-110.
    [Replies to My Friends] This is an answer to the critics of my book WHAT IT'S LIKE, OR WHAT IT'S ABOUT? THE PLACE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD (2017). I proceed from the least to the most serious objections. I start with Jakub Mihálik’s defense of Russellian Monism against my claim that it is not a genuine alternative to standard dualism and materialism. In reply, I claim this is a side issue to the central aim of my book, which (...)
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  9. Précis knihy Jaké to je, nebo o čem to je? Místo vědomí v materiálním světě.Tomáš Hříbek - 2017 - Filosofie Dnes 9 (2):4-22.
    [Précis of What It’s Like, or What It’s About? The Place of Consciousness in the Material World] The paper provides a summary of my recent Czech-language book, WHAT IT'S LIKE, OR WHAT IT'S ABOUT? THE PLACE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD (2017). As suggested by the subtitle, the topic of the book is philosophy of consciousness. In the contemporary literature, most participants have in mind the so-called phenomenal characters, and the main issue debated between dualists and materialists is whether (...)
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  10. Rethinking the Specious Present.Simon James Prosser - 2017 - In Ian Phillips (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience. London, UK: pp. 146-156.
    In this chapter I argue that despite its current popularity the doctrine of the specious present, or at least every current version of it, should be rejected. I describe two alternative accounts, which deal with experiences of two different kinds of change. The first is what I call the dynamic snapshot theory, which accounts for the way we experience continuous changes such as motion and other motion-like phenomena. The second account deals with the way we experience discontinuous changes, those for (...)
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  11. Illusionism and the Epistemological Problems Facing Phenomenal Realism.Amber Ross - 2016 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (11-12):215-223.
    Illusionism about phenomenal properties has the potential to leave us with all the benefit of taking consciousness seriously and far fewer problems than those accompanying phenomenal realism. The particular problem I explore here is an epistemological puzzle that leaves the phenomenal realist with a dilemma but causes no trouble for the illusionist: how can we account for false beliefs about our own phenomenal properties? If realism is true, facts about our phenomenal properties must hold independent of our beliefs about those (...)
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  12. De Se Puzzles, the Knowledge Argument, and the Formation of Internal Knowledge.Erich Rast - 2012 - Analysis and Metaphysics 11:106-132.
    ABSTRACT. Thought experiments about de se attitudes and Jackson’s original Knowledge Argument are compared with each other and discussed from the perspective of a computational theory of mind. It is argued that internal knowledge, i.e. knowledge formed on the basis of signals that encode aspects of their own processing rather than being intentionally directed towards external objects, suffices for explaining the seminal puzzles without resorting to acquaintance or phenomenal character as primitive notions. Since computationalism is ontologically neutral, the account also (...)
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  13. The Churchlands' war on qualia.Mark Crooks - 2008 - In Edmond Wright (ed.), The Case For Qualia. The MIT Press. pp. 203.
    The systematic phenomenology-denial within the works of Paul and Patricia Churchland is critiqued as to its coherence with the known elelmentary physics and physiology of perception. Paul Churchland misidentifies "qualia" with psychology's sensorimotor schemas, while Patricia Churchland illicitly propounds the intertheoretic identities of logical empiricism while rejecting the premises upon which those identities are based. Their analogies from such arguments to an identity of mind and brain thus have no inductive probability.
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  14. The Case for Qualia.Edmond Wright (ed.) - 2008 - MIT Press.
    Philosophical and scientific defenses of Indirect Realism and counterarguments to the attacks of qualiaphobes.
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  15. The evolving fortunes of eliminative materialism.Paul M. Churchland - 2007 - In Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan D. Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell.
  16. Phenomenal properties as dummy properties.Richard J. Hall - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 135 (2):199 - 223.
    Can the physicalist consistently hold that representational content is all there is to sensory experience and yet that two perceivers could have inverted phenomenal spectra? Yes, if he holds that the phenomenal properties the inverts experience are dummy properties, not instantiated in the physical objects being perceived nor in the perceivers.
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  17. New troubles for the qualia freak.Michael Tye - 2007 - In Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan D. Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell.
    The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like subjectively to undergo the experience. Experiences vary in their phenomenal character, in what it is like to un- dergo them. Think, for example of the subjective differences between feeling a burning pain in a toe, experiencing an itch in an arm, smelling rotten eggs, tasting Marmite, having a visual experience of bright purple, running one’s fingers over rough sandpaper, feeling hungry, experiencing anger, feeling elated. Insofar as what it is (...)
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  18. Where experiences are: Dualist, physicalist, enactive and reflexive accounts of phenomenal consciousness.Max Velmans - 2007 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (4):547-563.
    Dualists believe that experiences have neither location nor extension, while reductive and ‘non-reductive’ physicalists (biological naturalists) believe that experiences are really in the brain, producing an apparent impasse in current theories of mind. Enactive and reflexive models of perception try to resolve this impasse with a form of “externalism” that challenges the assumption that experiences must either be nowhere or in the brain. However, they are externalist in very different ways. Insofar as they locate experiences anywhere, enactive models locate conscious (...)
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  19. What is it Like to See a Bat? A Critique of Dretske’s Representationalist Theory of Qualia.Andrew Bailey - 2005 - Disputatio 1 (18):1 - 27.
    This paper critiques the representationalist account of qualia, focussing on the Representational Naturalism presented by Fred Dretske in Naturalizing the Mind. After laying out Dretskes theory of qualia and making clear its externalist consequences, I argue that Dretskes definition is either too liberal or runs into problems defending its requirements, in particular naturalness and mentalness. I go on to show that Dretskes account of qualia falls foul of the argument from misperception in such a way that Dretske must either admit (...)
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  20. Goodbye to qualia and all what? A reply to David Hodgson.R. S. Hacker - 2005 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (11):61-66.
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  21. Goodbye to qualia and all that? Review article.David Hodgson - 2005 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (2):84-88.
    Max Bennett is a distinguished Australian neuroscientist, Peter Hacker an Oxford philosopher and leading authority on Wittgenstein. A book resulting from their collaboration, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, has received high praise. According to the Blackwell website, G.H. von Wright asserts that it 'will certainly, for a long time to come, be the most important contribution to the mind-body problem that there is'; and Sir Anthony Kenny says it 'shows that the claims made on behalf of cognitive science are ill-founded'. M.R. (...)
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  22. Demystifying without quining: Wittgenstein and Dennett on qualitative states.Danielle Mason - 2005 - South African Journal of Philosophy 24 (1):33-43.
    In his 1991 book ‘Consciousness Explained', Daniel Dennett presents his “Multiple Drafts” model of consciousness. Central to his theory is the rejection of the notion of ‘qualia'; of the existence of the purported ‘qualitative character' of conscious experience that many argue rules out the possibility of a purely materialist theory of mind. In eliminating qualia from his theory of consciousness, Dennett claims to be following in the footsteps of Wittgenstein, who also had much to say regarding the nature of ‘private' (...)
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  23. Qualia that it is right to Quine.Manuel Garcia-Carpintero - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2):357-377.
    Dennett provides a much discussed argument for the nonexistence of qualia, as conceived by philosophers like Block, Chalmers, Loar and Searle. My goal in this paper is to vindicate Dennett's argument, construed in a certain way. The argument supports the claim that qualia are constitutively representational. Against Block and Chalmers, the argument rejects the detachment of phenomenal from information-processing consciousness; and against Loar and Searle, it defends the claim that qualia are constitutively representational in an externalist understanding of this. The (...)
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  24. 26 Quining Qualia.Daniel C. Dennett - 2002 - In David J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Oxford University Press. pp. 226.
  25. Why qualia cannot be quined.R. C. Pradhan - 2002 - Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 19 (2):85-102.
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  26. Visual qualia and visual content revisited.Michael Tye - 2002 - In David J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Oxford University Press.
    Experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is _like_ for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philoso- phers often use the term 'qualia' to refer to the introspectively accessible properties of experiences (...)
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  27. Phenomenal continua and the sorites.Delia Graff Fara - 2001 - Mind 110 (440):905-935.
    I argue that, contrary to widespread philosophical opinion, phenomenal indiscriminability is transitive. For if it were not transitive, we would be precluded from accepting the truisms that if two things look the same then the way they look is the same and that if two things look the same then if one looks red, so does the other. Nevertheless, it has seemed obvious to many philosophers (e.g. Goodman, Armstrong and Dummett) that phenomenal indiscriminability is not transitive; and, moreover, that this (...)
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  28. Qualia realism.Amy Kind - 2001 - Philosophical Studies 104 (2):143 - 162.
    Philosophical Studies 104: 143-162 (2001).
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  29. Representacionalismo y qualia.Nora Stigol - 2001 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 20 (3):31-38.
  30. Qualifying Qualia Through the Skyhook Test.Tere Vadén - 2001 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 44 (2):149-169.
    If we are to preserve qualia, one possibility is to take the current academic, philosophical, and theoretical notion less seriously and current natural science and some pre-theoretical intuitions about qualia more seriously. Dennett (1997) is instrumental in showing how ideas of the intrinsicalness and privacy of qualia are misguided and those of ineffability and immediacy misinterpreted. However, by combining ideas of non-mechanicalness used in contemporary natural science with the pre-theoretical idea that qualia are special because they are unique, we get (...)
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  31. Dennett on qualia: The case of pain, smell and taste.Drakon Nikolinakos - 2000 - Philosophical Psychology 13 (4):505 – 522.
    Dennett has maintained that a careful examination of our intuitive notion of qualia reveals that it is a confused notion, that it is advisable to accept that experience does not have the properties designated by it and that it is best to eliminate it. Because most scientists share this notion of qualia, the major line of attack of his project becomes that of raising objections against the ability of science to answer some basic questions about qualia. I try to show (...)
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  32. Naturalizing qualia, destroying qualia. P. - 2000 - Diálogos. Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Puerto Rico 35 (76):65-83.
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  33. Out with Qualia and in with Consciousness: Why the Hard Problem is a Myth.Marcus Arvan - 1998 - Dissertation, Tufts Honours Thesis
    The subjective features of conscious mental processes--as opposed to their physical causes and effects--cannot be captured by the purified form of thought suitable for dealing with the physical world that underlies appearances.".
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  34. The qualities of qualia.David de Léon - 1997 - Communication and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal 34 (1):121-138.
    This essay is a defence of the traditional notion of qualia - as properties of consciousness that are ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediately apprehensible - against the eliminative attempts of Daniel Dennett in the influential article "Quining Qualia." It is suggested that a thorough exploration of the concept is an appropriate starting point for future explanations of qualia, and the essay ends with some possible explanations of the four traditional properties.
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  35. Against Dennett's eliminativism: Preserving qualia as a coherent concept.Eugene Park - 1997 - The Dualist 4.
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  36. Experience and Content: Consequences of a Continuum Theory.W. M. Davies - 1996 - Avebury.
    This book is about experiential content: what it is; what kind of account can be given of it. I am concerned with identifying and attacking one main view - I call it the inferentialist proposal. This account is central to the philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science and perception. I claim, however, that it needs to be recast into something far more subtle and enriched, and I attempt to provide a better alternative in these pages. The inferentialist proposal (...)
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  37. Phenomenal externalism, or if meanings ain't in the head, where are qualia?Fred Dretske - 1996 - Philosophical Issues 7:143-158.
  38. Qualia and vagueness.Anthony Everett - 1996 - Synthese 106 (2):205-226.
    In this paper I present two arguments against the thesis that we experience qualia. I argue that if we experienced qualia then these qualia would have to be essentially vague entities. And I then offer two arguments, one a reworking of Gareth Evans' argument against the possibility of vague objects, the other a reworking of the Sorites argument, to show that no such essentially vague entities can exist. I consider various objections but argue that ultimately they all fail. In particular (...)
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  39. What do qualia do?Richard L. Gregory - 1996 - Perception 25:377-79.
  40. Out of the Closet.Joseph Levine - 1994 - Philosophical Topics 22 (1-2):107-126.
  41. Orwell, stalin, and determinate qualia.William S. Robinson - 1994 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 75 (2):151-64.
  42. Quining qualia Quine's way.Don Ross - 1993 - Dialogue 32 (3):439-59.
    Thanks largely to Daniel Dennett, I am a recent convert to what many will regard as the shocking hypothesis that qualia do not exist. This admission is not quite a confident sighting of that rarest of philosophical birds, an unequivocally sound and valid argument. For one thing, I have, like many, been frustrated by and suspicious of philosophers' use of qualia for some time, and have often wished them dead ; so I was an easy mark. More to the point, (...)
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  43. The elimination of experience.William Seager - 1993 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (2):345-65.
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  44. Lovely and suspect qualities.Daniel C. Dennett - 1991 - In Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Philosophical Issues. Ridgeview. pp. 37-43.
    A family of compelling intuitions work to keep "the problem of consciousness" systematically insoluble, and David Rosenthal, in a series of papers including the one under discussion, has been resolutely driving these intuitions apart, exposing them individually to the light, and proposing alternatives. In this instance the intuition that has seemed sacrosanct, but falls to his analysis, is the intuition that "sensory quality" and consciousness are necessarily united: that, for instance, there could not be unconscious pains, or unconscious subjective shades (...)
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  45. Qualia and theory reduction: A criticism of Paul Churchland.Jay E. Bachrach - 1990 - Iyyun 281.
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  46. A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science.Paul M. Churchland - 1989 - MIT Press.
    A Neurocomputationial Perspective illustrates the fertility of the concepts and data drawn from the study of the brain and of artificial networks that model the...
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  47. Knowing qualia: A reply to Jackson.Paul M. Churchland - 1989 - In Yujin Nagasawa, Peter Ludlow & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), A Neurocomputational Perspective. MIT Press. pp. 163--178.
  48. Querying "quining qualia".Edmond L. Wright - 1989 - Acta Analytica 4 (5):9-32.
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  49. Quining qualia.Daniel C. Dennett - 1988 - In Anthony J. Marcel & E. Bisiach (eds.), Consciousness in Contemporary Science. Oxford University Press.
    " Qualia " is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the (...)
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  50. Reduction, qualia and the direct introspection of brain states.Paul M. Churchland - 1985 - Journal of Philosophy 82 (January):8-28.
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