Abstract
Many philosophers think that there could be a creature that looks, talks, and acts just like a human being but that has no inner awareness, no feelings, no qualia. These philosophers call such a hypothetical being a ‘zombie’, and they use the possibility of zombies to defend central claims in the philosophy of mind. In this essay, I use Wittgensteinian ideas to argue, against such philosophers, that the notion of a zombie is incoherent. I argue first that the possibility of zombies would entail a radical form of skepticism about other minds. I then use that result to argue that philosophers who believe zombies are possible cannot account for the meaningfulness of terms like ‘pain’, ‘qualia’, and ‘phenomenal consciousness’. Since philosophers who think zombies are possible require such terms to define their position, I conclude that such philosophers employ words to which they have given no meaning. I close the essay by reflecting on the nature of these arguments and by drawing some Wittgensteinian lessons about the character of our mental concepts.
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Notes
- 1.
Eric Marcus reaches a similar conclusion via a quite different argument in “Why Zombies are Inconceivable” (Marcus 2004).
- 2.
One could press the question of antecedents, to ask what gave rise to skepticism about other minds and why that problem became acute in the nineteenth century and remains so today. (For a brief synopsis of the history of the problem, see Hyslop (2018). These important questions lie beyond the scope of the present essay.
- 3.
I use the term ‘humanoid’ to refer to a creature that is either a human being (who possesses consciousness) or a zombie (who doesn’t).
- 4.
‘The best evidence of contemporary science tells us that the physical world is more or less causally closed: for every physical event, there is a physical sufficient cause. If so, there is no room for a mental “ghost in the machine” to do any extra causal work.’ The qualification ‘more or less’ is to allow for quantum indeterminacy which, Chalmers argues, ‘cannot be exploited to yield a causal role for a nonphysical mind’ (Chalmers 1996, p. 125).
- 5.
Chalmers embraces the possibility of an inverted spectrum and uses it as an additional argument against physicalism at (Chalmers 1996, pp. 99–101).
- 6.
I do not mean to endorse this line of argument. A contrary position is that the concept of knowledge is fundamental, and that merely having a justified belief that p should be understood as a privation of the fundamental relation of knowing that p. Investigating this issue, while important, would take us beyond the scope of this essay.
- 7.
Robert Kirk asserts that using Wittgenstein’s private language argument against the conceivability of zombies will amount to begging the question against those who think zombies are conceivable (Kirk 2019). I hope that the structure of my presentation shows that a Wittgensteinian argument does not have to beg the question.
Works Cited
Chalmers, David. The Conscious Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Hyslop, Alec. “Other Minds”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/other-.minds/>.
Kirk, Robert. “Zombies”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/zombies/>.
Marcus, Eric. “Why Zombies Are Inconceivable”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (3):477–490 (2004).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 4th ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967.
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Witherspoon, E. (2020). Wittgenstein versus Zombies: An Investigation of Our Mental Concepts. In: Wuppuluri, S., da Costa, N. (eds) WITTGENSTEINIAN (adj.). The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27569-3_22
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