Abstract
Qualia have proved difficult to integrate into a broadly physicalistic worldview. In this paper, I argue that despite popular wisdom in the philosophy of mind, qualia’s intrinsicality is not sufficient for their non-reducibility. Second, I diagnose why philosophers mistakenly focused on intrinsicality. I then proceed to argue that qualia are categorical and end with some reflections on how the conceptual territory looks when we keep our focus on categoricity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
To forestall potential confusion, let me note at the outset that I take these distinctions to be neither conceptually nor extensionally equivalent. Getting clear about the difference between them is one of the main goals of the paper.
In fairness to Levine, and in light of my eventual emphasis on the categorical/dispositional distinction, it is worth noting that Levine himself provides the following footnote to this passage: “Or dispositional properties. I’m treating dispositional properties as if they were relational, since for the purposes at issue we needn’t distinguish between them. However, they aren’t really the same thing” (p. 188, n. 1). It is the contention of my paper that the distinction does matter for the issue at hand.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for Erkenntnis for encouraging me to make this clarification.
Other notable philosophers who emphasize, or explore, the non-reductive import of qualia’s intrinsicness include Chalmers (1996, p. 153 and 2002, p. 265), Lockwood (1989), Maxwell (1978), and Rosenberg (2004, see esp. pp. 27–28). Many of these authors take inspiration from Russell (1927). It is worth pointing out that Dennett (1988), no fan of qualia, identifies intrinsicness as one feature that is both definitive and in need of “Quining”.
Levine is a trickier case. In his early work on the explanatory gap, he seemed to be reasoning in this way (see, e.g., 1983, p. 356). But his denial of analyticity, apparent in Purple Haze, would lead him to reject (4), as according to him, there is next to nothing by way of primary intension to analyze. Of course, the explanatory gap argument targets type–type identity and not functionalism. But Levine’s requirement that an explanatory reduction involve “derivability” (pp. 70–76) and the attendant requirement for a relational specification of the target of reduction brings him perilously close to requiring functionalizability. For his arguments that qualia cannot be specified in relational terms, see pp. 96–104.
Strictly speaking, it is not a property that is functionalizable, but the corresponding predicate, for as I understand it, to say that an F is functionalizable is to say that it can be exhaustively analyzed in functional terms.
The idea that dispositions are intrinsic is a reigning orthodoxy. Among those who ascribe to it are Armstrong (1973), Bird (1998), Harré (1970), Lewis (1997), Mackie (1977), Mellor (1974), Molnar (1999, 2003). McKitrick (2003) breaks from orthodoxy and argues that at least some dispositions are extrinsic.
The hedge is meant to cover mimicking and masking cases (for one discussion of these sorts of cases, see Johnston (1992)). There is some question whether any subjunctive conditional analysis of dispositions will prove viable. But even those who attack a conditional analysis of dispositions (C. B. Martin, for example) concede that dispositions have some important relation to subjunctive conditionals (see his 1994, p. 2).
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for raising this concern.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for raising this concern.
If one wants such a defense, a good place to start is with Mumford (1998, esp. Chap. 3).
Note that my argument here is meant to establish the conditional: if being an electron were strongly intrinsic, it would (still) admit of a functional characterization. Since the hypothesis will be discharged, the argument does not depend on the truth of essentialism about being an electron.
Perhaps it would be worth citing a philosopher who maintains this position. Although Mumford does not endorse dispositional essentialism across the board, he does so for certain fundamental kinds of properties, such as being an electron (see his 1998, pp. 232–238). As such, when it comes to the property of being an electron, Mumford would assert both that it is strongly intrinsic and that it admits of an exhaustive functional analysis.
I owe this example to John Heil.
Functionalism comes in a variety of forms. For my purposes, this generic characterization will serve. In what follows, I will focus on varieties of functionalism, prominent in the philosophy of mind, that understand the state transitions to be causal. Notice that even so-called computational versions of functionalism are most likely best interpreted as a variety of causal functionalism, as Piccinini (2010) argues.
Of course, this characterization is inadequate. For one, the mention of ‘the perceived’ source of damage would have to be replaced with a further functional specification. But the rough shape of the characterization is enough.
My diagnosis of the imaginative act bears affinities to Nagel’s remarks in his (famous) footnote 11 in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” We both maintain that the painy feel is necessarily connected to pain but prima facie only contingently connected to pain’s typical causal powers. Christopher Hill develops Nagel’s remarks to argue against the reliability of the conceivability/possibility link, at least for the conceivability in play for property dualism arguments (see his 1997). But my own approach will be different, as I will be asking what the world would have to be like if our conceiving were reliable. I would like to thank an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this connection.
One might be concerned (as an anonymous referee was) that the emphasis on actual causal relations is at odds with functionalism’s commitment to an abstract characterization of mental states. But we could replace talk of causal relations with talk of temporal sequences of states (like the tape in a Turing Machine) and the argument I give in the text would be unaffected.
In fact, appearances here are misleading. A sophisticated functionalist would identify pain by its typical causal role. So, pain is a state that tends to be caused by tissue damage, tends to cause the belief that one is in pain, etc. But on this construal, it seems especially difficult to see why anyone would think that the intrinsicality of pain should be problematic. For such tendencies seem dispositional and to construe these dispositions as relational confuses a relational description with a relational property.
Strictly speaking, it is the property of being in pain that is intrinsic as opposed to the state of pain. For the sake of readability, I am going to use the non-strict locution in the text.
It bears mention that categorical properties, so characterized, fly in the face of the dominant causal theory of properties. So, e.g., there (conceptually) could be two objects each of which has the same overall set of potential behaviors but nevertheless are distinct in their categorical properties. What could such properties be, if their being is not discernible via even potential behavior? As will emerge, one clear candidate is qualia, the ‘what-it-is-like’ aspect of conscious experience.
There is a burgeoning literature on dispositions. For an excellent survey, see Fara (2008).
Later I will argue that this can serve as a sufficient condition as well (see Sect. 5).
My claim here should be understood as restricted to concreta, that is, to properties instantiated in space–time.
An aside for those familiar with the dispositions literature. Premise (10) might strike you as rather naïve in light of masking and mimicking cases (see Bird (1998), Johnston (1992) and Martin (1994)). And in a way, it is naïve. But for our purposes these complications are beside the point. In the Absent Qualia Case, it is not that there is some complex mimicking of the relevant disposition. Rather, the genuine disposition is present, it just fails to ‘entail’ the painy feel, and so fails to ‘entail’ that the subject is experiencing pain. As such, we could stipulate that the conditionals that underlie the functional analysis of pain have explicit provisos excluding cases of masking and mimicking. Even with these provisos in place, there will still be cases that satisfy the functional description but fail to be pain.
An exhaustive defense of (10) would involve taking the extant plausible accounts of dispositions and showing that each is committed to it. Such a defense would be tedious. Besides the more intuitive support I offered above, I will only note that it seems promising that David Lewis’ Sophisticated Conditional Analysis could be shown to entail (10) as could the Simple Conditional Analysis.
Notice, if we were to relax this stricture and allow that some properties are both categorical and dispositional, we would still get an interesting result: namely, that being in pain is at least partly categorical. That is, being in pain is not purely dispositional.
If one wants a primary source, as it were, Armstrong seems happy to understand the categorical as non-dispositional. See (1996, p. 80) where he defines his categoricalism as maintaining that there are only non-dispositional properties. For philosophers who would deny (13) see Martin in Armstrong et al. (1996, chap. 5), and following his lead, Heil (2003, chap. 11), although both prefer the term “qualitative” to “categorical.”
Of course, if one builds into the functional description the painy feel itself, then it will entail that the system experiences a painy feel. But such a maneuver would surely not vindicate an (unrestricted) functional account of pain, for it is clear that the entailment has nothing to do with the functional description. Rather, it goes through because of self-entailment.
If this is on the right track, then at the heart of the Absent Qualia Argument lies an old observation of Hume’s, viz. that a relation between distinct existences is never a matter of a relation of ideas. It strikes me that this would be a connection well worth exploring, but it is too late in the current paper to pursue it here.
We might be wary of allowing any functional characterization to pick out a real disposition, lest we allow highly artificial dispositions (e.g., if x is placed in a grue solution, it will turn bleen). The ‘suitably regimented’ serves as a placeholder for some condition that would serve to rule out such cases. The proviso should not affect the revised argument, as presumably the functionalizability required for reduction would operate on well-behaved predicates. As such, I’ll drop it in the main text.
Recall that (Cat) should be understood as concerned only with properties of concreta.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for Erkenntnis for raising this objection and in particular, for drawing my attention to Cohen and Shoemaker.
I would like to thank Renée Smith for helpful discussions of Shoemaker and recommend her (2007) for a useful presentation, and insightful criticism, of Shoemaker’s recent work on qualia.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for Erkenntnis for raising this objection.
References
Armstrong, D. (1968). A materialist theory of the mind. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Armstrong, D. (1973). Belief, truth and knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, D. (1997). A world of states of affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, D., Martin, C. B., & Place, U. T. (1996). Dispositions: A Debate. In Tim Crane (Ed.), London: Routledge.
Bird, A. (1998). Dispositions and antidotes. The Philosophical Quarterly, 48, 227–234.
Block, Ned. (1978). Troubles with functionalism. In C. W. Savage (Ed.), Perception and cognition: issues in the foundations of psychology (Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science 9) (pp. 261–325). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. (2002). “Consciousness and its place in nature.” (Reprinted in D. Chalmers (Ed.)) (2002). Philosophy of mind: Classical and contemporary readings (pp. 247–272). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, J. (2003). Color: A functionalist proposal. Philosophical Studies, 113, 1–42.
Cohen, J. (2009). The red and the real. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Dennett, D. (1988). Quining qualia. In A. Marcel & E. Bisiach (Eds.), Consciousness in contemporary science (pp. 42–77). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fara, M. (2008). “Dispositions.”. In E. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2008 Edn.). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/dispositions/.
Harré, R. (1970). Powers. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 21, 81–101.
Heil, J. (2003). From an ontological point of view. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Hill, C. (1997). Imaginability, conceivability, possibility, and the mind-body problem. Philosophical Studies, 87, 61–85.
Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly, 32, 127–136.
Johnston, M. (1992). How to speak of the colors. Philosophical Studies, 68, 221–263.
Kim, J. (1982). Psychophysical supervenience. Philosophical Studies, 41, 51–70.
Kim, J. (1998). Mind in a physical world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levine, J. (1983). “The explanatory gap.” (Reprinted in D. Chalmers (Ed.), (2002)). Philosophy of mind: Classical and contemporary readings (pp. 354–359). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levine, J. (2001). Purple haze. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, D. (1967). An argument for the identity theory. Journal of Philosophy, 63, 17–25.
Lewis, D. (1983). Extrinsic properties. Philosophical Studies, 44, 197–200.
Lewis, D. (1994). Reduction of mind. In S. Guttenplan (Ed.), A companion to the philosophy of mind (pp. 412–431). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lewis, D. (1997). Finkish dispositions. The Philosophical Quarterly, 47, 143–158.
Lewis, D., & Langton, R. (1998). Defining ‘intrinsic’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 58, 333–345.
Lockwood, M. (1989). Mind, brain, and the quantum. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Mackie, J. L. (1977). Dispositions, grounds and causes. Synthese, 34, 361–370.
Martin, C. B. (1994). Dispositions and conditionals. The Philosophical Quarterly, 44, 1–8.
Martin, C. B., & Heil, J. (1999). The ontological turn. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 23, 34–60.
Maxwell, G. (1978). Rigid designators and mind-brain identity. In C. W. Savage (Ed.), Minnesota studies in philosophy of science (Vol. 9). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McKitrick, J. (2003). A case for extrinsic dispositions. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 81, 155–174.
Mellor, D. H. (1974). In defense of dispositions. The Philosophical Review, 83, 157–181.
Molnar, G. (1999). Are dispositions reducible? The Philosophical Quarterly, 49, 1–17.
Molnar, G. (2003). Powers: A study in dispositions. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Mumford, S. (1998). Dispositions. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435–450.
Piccinini, G. (2010). The mind as neural software? Understanding functionalism, computationalism, and computational functionalism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(2), 69–311.
Rosenberg, G. (2004). A place for consciousness. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Russell, B. (1927). An analysis of matter. London: Kegan Paul.
Shoemaker, S. (1980). Causality and properties. In P. van Inwagen (Ed.), Time and cause (pp. 109–135). Dordrecht: Reidel.
Shoemaker, S. (1990). “Qualities and qualia: What’s in the mind?”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Supplement 50, 109–131.
Shoemaker, S. (1991). Qualia and consciousness. Mind, 100(399), 507–524.
Shoemaker, S. (1994). Phenomenal character. Noûs, 28(1), 21–38.
Smith, R. (2007). Shoemaker’s moderate qualia realism and the transparency of qualia. Disputatio, II(22), 101–113.
Stoljar, D. (2001). Two conceptions of the physical. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62, 253–281.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the members of the 2006 NEH Summer Seminar, “Mind and Metaphysics,” and especially its director, John Heil, for helpful discussions of the general ideas expressed here. I would also like to thank Robert Schroer for his consistent and invaluable help in our ongoing philosophical discussions. Finally, I would like to thank the three anonymous referees for Erkenntnis for their insightful comments. The paper has definitely benefitted from their work. Of course, any mistakes or confusions that remain are entirely my own.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
O’Sullivan, B. Absent Qualia and Categorical Properties. Erkenn 76, 353–371 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9346-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9346-3