Phenomenal Concepts and the Materialist Constraint

Physicalism holds that everything, including consciousness, can be explained in physical terms. This chapter argues that the 'phenomenal concept strategy'—which tries to close the explanatory gap between physical descriptions and subjective experience by appealing to special concepts we have of our own mental states—faces a serious problem. For such accounts to work, they must not rely on any basic, unexplained mental relation, such as a primitive notion of acquaintance between a person and her brain states. The author contends that it is unclear how any physicalist account can meet this requirement while still explaining how the explanatory gap arises from phenomenal concepts. The possibility is raised that physicalism may be false not because phenomenal properties are non-physical, but because our relation to them is brute and irreducible to physical relations.

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Abstract

AbstractThis 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.