Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy
The Phenomenal Concept Strategy and the Explanatory Gap
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Janet Levin (USC)
25 May 2016 | 15:00 | Seminari de Filosofia UB
Abstract
Many who challenge physicalistic theories of conscious experience maintain that no amount of reflection about the physical features of our bodies, brains, and environment can make it intelligible how certain sorts of neural processes could be, or give rise to, states such as pain or the experience of red—and thus physicalistic theories of conscious experience are false, or at best problematic. This is known as the “explanatory gap”.
And many who defend physicalistic theories of conscious experience invoke the “Phenomenal Concepts Strategy” (PCS), which maintains that there is something special about our phenomenal concepts—those introspection-derived concepts of our sensations and perceptual experiences that we use to talk and think about these states—that can explain why this gap occurs, and why it does not threaten physicalism. There are many versions of this “strategy”, however—and it has been the subject of many challenges.
My aim in this paper is to defend (a particular version of) the PCS against some more recent objections presented by Philip Goff (2011, 2014) and E.L. Holman (2013). I will also suggest that attention to the details of how, on this view, phenomenal concepts work can be recruited to give a pragmatic account of how—maybe someday—the explanatory gap could be narrowed, at least a bit. Finally, I will argue that a strategy of this sort is not available to those who understand phenomenal properties to be properties of external objects rather than of mental states, and discuss some implications of this conclusion.
