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This chapter focuses on the topic of phenomenal concepts. It develops and extends the comparison of phenomenal concepts with so-called “perceptual concepts,” to throw the nature of phenomenal concepts into clearer focus. A position against a recent argument by David Chalmers against the whole type-B strategy of defending physicalism by appeal to phenomenal concepts is defended.

Philosophers have reacted in different ways to the apparent explanatory gap between physical processes and consciousness. Some deny that any explanatory gap exists at all. Some hold that there is an explanatory gap for now, but that it will eventually be closed. Some hold that the explanatory gap corresponds to an ontological gap in nature. This chapter explores another reaction to the explanatory gap — those who react in this way agree that there is an explanatory gap, but they hold that it stems from the way we think about consciousness. In particular, this view locates the gap in the relationship between our concepts of physical processes and our concepts of consciousness, rather than in the relationship between physical processes and consciousness themselves.

This chapter presents a version of the phenomenal concept strategy based on a limited defense of the “demonstrative account” of phenomenal concepts. In this account, phenomenal concepts pick out their referents directly, much like demonstratives, without mediation by any mode of presentation. It is argued that this shows that many type-B materialists appeal to this account to help explain why there is an epistemic gap but no metaphysical gap, and that the account can meet objections present elsewhere. It is further argued that recent emendations to the account, including those by Katalin Balog, Block, Papineau, and Levine, concede too much to the antiphysicalists while accomplishing too little. Demonstrative theorists are urged to return to their roots.

This chapter raises a problem for the phenomenal concept strategy. The problem is framed partly in terms of the explanatory gap, which is roughly the claim that the existence or nature of phenomenal consciousness cannot be completely explained in physical terms. As applied to the explanatory gap, the phenomenal concept strategy requires a physicalist account of phenomenal concepts on which the gap derives from phenomenal concepts rather than phenomenal consciousness itself. It is argued that to pass muster, such accounts must satisfy the following constraint: that no appeal be made in the explanation to any mental property or relation that is basic. An account violates this constraint if, for example, it makes appeal to an unexplained notion of acquaintance between a subject and her brain states. It is not understood how any physicalist account can both meet this constraint and explain how the explanatory gap derives from the peculiar features of phenomenal concepts. Although some physicalist account might achieve these goals, it is suggested that physicalism may be false not because phenomenal properties themselves are not physical but rather because somehow we embody a relation to them that is itself brute and irreducible to physical relations.

This chapter develops an account of the distinctive nature of phenomenal concepts, grounded in part in an analysis of the epistemological and conceptual observations that drive the arguments against materialism. It argues that phenomenal concepts behave in a way that is quite unlike most other concepts, involving a very strong sort of direct reference, on which the phenomenal qualities that are the referents of the concepts are also somehow present inside their sense. Here, the two-dimensional framework is again a useful tool in analyzing the phenomenon. The account in this chapter is in principle compatible with materialism; in recent years some materialists have developed closely related accounts, but think the account itself is considered fairly neutral.

Confronted with the apparent explanatory gap between physical processes and consciousness, philosophers have reacted in many different ways. Some deny that any explanatory gap exists at all. Some hold that there is an explanatory gap for now but that it will eventually be closed. Some hold that the explanatory gap corresponds to an ontological gap in nature. This chapter explores another reaction to the explanatory gap. Those who react in this way agree that there is an explanatory gap, but they hold that it stems from the way we think about consciousness. In particular, this view locates the gap in the relationship between our concepts of physical processes and our concepts of consciousness, rather than in the relationship between physical processes and consciousness themselves.

Explores the structure of phenomenal concepts. It examines how far they are expressed by everyday words, compares them to perceptual concepts, develops a quotational model of their workings, considers how far they give rise to incorrigible judgements, and discusses whether they violate Wittgenstein's “private language argument”.

Many scientists hope that brain research will identify the material nature of conscious states. Papineau argues that when it comes to the “hard problem” of identifying the material referents of phenomenal concepts, scientific research can only take us so far. This is because phenomenal concepts are vague and do not point determinately to specific material states. This chapter also looks at Higher‐Order Thought (HOT) and representational accounts of consciousness.

This chapter elaborates and defends a set of metaphysical and epistemic claims that comprise what is called 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. While this approach is a descendant of Russell’s acquaintance theory, it is epistemically more modest than that theory. The chapter shows that the acquaintance approach’s hallmark thesis does not carry the ambitious epistemic implications often associated with acquaintance views. And the chapter defends that thesis from objections stemming from what is required for an epistemically substantial grasp of the phenomenal, and from Stalnaker’s worry that, if the thesis were true, information about the phenomenal would be incommunicable.

This chapter further develops a line of argument Daniel Dennett presented in his 1991 book, Consciousness Explained, where he argued that we should reject the intuition that Mary gains knowledge when she leaves the room. In his view, this intuition derives from a failure to appreciate the implications of knowing all the physical facts. Dennet gives a more detailed account of his case. Specifically, he (1) criticizes attempts to defend the intuition; (2) devises variations on the Mary case to illustrate how a deduction from physical information of what it's like to see in color might actually proceed; and (3) defends his arguments against objections. He affirmatively answers the question: could a proper understanding of phenomenal concepts/knowledge show that there is or is not an epistemic gap? He argues that a proper understanding of phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge helps to show that there is no epistemic gap.

The argument from consciousness maintains that correlations between brain states and conscious states of persons require explanation but cannot be given an adequate scientific explanation. The chapter then argues that the best explanation of these correlations is that they are the result of the work of a purposeful supernatural agent. The aim is two-fold. First, the chapter considers and rebuts recent attempts in the philosophy of mind to defend a physicalist account of the phenomenal character of experience (accounts which, if successful, would undercut the core premise of the argument from consciousness). It then considers two versions of the argument from consciousness and contend that they are defective, since they overlook a naturalistic form of explanation that is available even on a robustly dualistic account of conscious states. However, it goes on to show that the argument may more plausibly be recast by treating the very form of explanation of conscious states it outlines as a further datum in the fine-tuning version of the design argument.

Chapter 2 considers an important objection to the response to the knowledge argument developed in Chapter 1: it misconstrues the nature of our paradigmatic phenomenal concepts. In the response, I propose an account of phenomenal concepts inspired by Hilary Putnam, Frank Jackson, and David Chalmers is proposed, and I develop a view about the content of phenomenal property representation analogous to the dual-content theory of secondary quality representation advanced by Chalmers. In addition, I contend that the response can withstand an objection that Sydney Shoemaker directs against projectivist accounts of sensory secondary quality representation. Finally, I argue that all of this provides the physicalist with an effective reply to those, like Joseph Levine and Robert Adams, who suggest that there is an explanatory gap between the physical and the phenomenal that we do not understand how to close.

The purpose of this chapter is to outline the phenomenal-concept strategy and to show some serious difficulties that it encounters. Physicalists have thought that they were wedded to phenomenal concepts since without them, physicalism becomes a falsehood. In order to explain away the difficulties presented here, it must be accepted that there are no such things as phenomenal concepts. There is widespread agreement that consciousness is, and should be, a physical phenomenon, even if it is one that we do not yet understand and perhaps may never do so fully. There is also widespread agreement that the way to defend physicalism about consciousness against well-known objections is by an appeal to phenomenal concepts. The previous chapter has shown, however, that there is no agreement on the nature of phenomenal concepts. It is the goal of this and subsequent chapters to show that the view assuming a conjugal relationship between physicalism and phenomenal concepts is gravely mistaken.

The best argument for the existence of phenomenal concepts is Frank Jackson's “knowledge argument”. Contra Jackson, this does not establish ontological dualism, but it does establish conceptual dualism in the sense that it shows that we have phenomenal concepts distinct from any material concepts. This analysis goes beyond the normal “ability hypothesis” response to Jackson's argument, but it appeals to the same powers of subjective imagination and introspection.

Argues for the need to recognise higher-order perceptual experiences and briefly argues for the superiority of the author’s own dispositional HOT version of higher-order perception (HOP) theory (here described as ‘dual-content theory’). But its main focus is on purely recognitional concepts of experience (often called ‘phenomenal concepts’). There is an emerging consensus amongst naturalistically minded philosophers that the existence of such concepts is the key to blocking the zombie-style arguments of both dualist mysterians like Chalmers and physicalist mysterians like McGinn and Levine. But, the author argues in this chapter that a successful account of the possibility of such concepts requires acceptance of one or another form of higher-order perception theory.

Addresses an important challenge to any evidentialist view of the justification that conscious states provide. The challenge strongly suggests that something other than evidence plays a central role in epistemic justification, something like reliability or intellectual virtue. It is argued that nothing beyond evidence is needed.

Chapter 3 develops a response to David Chalmers’s conceivability argument against (ordinary) physicalism analogous to the objection to the knowledge argument set out in Chapter 1. The conceivability argument hinges on the claim that it is conceivable, in an appropriately sophisticated way, that a world that is (nothing but) an exact physical duplicate of the actual world feature no phenomenal consciousness – i.e., that a zombie world is conceivable. From this premise the argument reasons to the conclusion that the complete physical truth does not necessitate the complete phenomenal truth, or even any phenomenal truth, and that therefore physicalism is false. I develop a response to this argument appeals to the same central claim as the foregoing reply to the knowledge argument. Physicalism requires that phenomenal truths be a priori derivable from the complete physical truth about the actual world. However, if introspection did represent phenomenal states inaccurately, on analogy with our ordinary visual color representations on Locke’s conception, then the truth of physicalism would not require propositions about phenomenal properties as they are represented introspectively to be derivable a priori from the complete physical truth about the actual world. For if the qualitative natures these phenomenal properties are introspectively represented as having are incorrectly attributed to them, and are features these properties actually lack, then it might well be that all facts about the real natures of phenomenal states are derivable a priori from the complete physical truth after all.

This chapter addresses antiphysicalist arguments such as the knowledge and conceivability arguments, which argue from the premise that there is an epistemic/conceptual/explanatory gap between phenomenal and physical descriptions of the world to the conclusion that phenomenal states and qualia cannot be identical to physical states and properties. Loar agrees about the existence of these gaps but denies that the falsity of physicalism follows from it. The strategy he offers in this chapter to refute these arguments is based on the idea that these conceptual, epistemic, and explanatory gaps can be explained by appeal to the nature of phenomenal concepts rather than to non-physical phenomenal properties. Phenomenal concepts, on this proposal, are recognitional concepts, which involve unique cognitive mechanisms, but none that could not be fully physically implemented.