Abstract
The conceivability argument against materialism, originally raised by Saul Kripke and then reformulated, among others, by David Chalmers holds that we can conceive of the distinctness of a phenomenal state and its neural realiser, or, in Chalmers’ variation of the argument, a zombie world. Here I argue that both phenomenal and natural kind terms are ambiguous between two senses, phenomenal and natural, and that the conceivability argument goes through only on one reading of a term. Thus, the antimaterialist has to provide some reasons independent of anti-materialism itself to favour that reading of a term that supports his or her argument. Given that there are no such independent reasons, I conclude that we should put more weight on empirical considerations than on a priori discussion in resolving the question concerning the identity between a phenomenal state and its neural realiser.
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Notes
Here I use the term ‘materialism’ equivalently with ‘physicalism’. The conceivability argument is directed mainly at a supervenience form of materialism; that is, that phenomenal facts supervene on the physical. ‘Supervenience’ means here that a physical duplicate of our world cannot differ from our world in any phenomenal respect.
In (1) and (2), ‘pain’ abbreviates the statement ‘pain exists’ and ‘water’ abbreviates the statement ‘water exists’.
A logical behaviourist or a logical functionalist (e.g. Braddon-Mitchell’s and Jackson’s (1996) common sense functionalism) would not accept this possibility, for he or she would hold that it is a conceptual truth that pain is caused by tissue damage, that it causes the subject to try to prevent further damage, and so on. But we can simply deny that this is a conceptual truth, on the grounds that we can conceive of the quale of pain existing without the behavioural dispositions. A less radical example of the same kind is inverted spectrum: we could switch the behavioural dispositions linked with seeing red with the dispositions linked with seeing blue.
Notice that one need not necessarily accept that whimsical imaginary cases like these are truly possible in order to accept the main claim of this paper that ‘water’ and ‘pain’ refer both to a natural and to a phenomenal object. These imaginary cases are presented only to help the reader see the equivalence between how the terms refer.
One might criticise that pain exists in the zombie world only in the zombie dialect of English, where the term denotes merely a physical-functional entity, whereas pain does not exists in the zombie world in our dialect of English, where the term denotes a phenomenal sensation. This objection, however, begs the question: in the actual world there are two possible candidates to be the referent of the term ‘pain’ (a sensation, or the neural realiser of this sensation) just as there are two possible referents for ‘water’ (a sensation, or the external cause of this sensation). Thus, it is open for us to say that, in a sense, there exists pain in the zombie world. The only difference between the zombie dialect of English and our dialect is that in the former no phenomenal readings of terms exist, for there is nothing that could ground such readings.
An anonymous referee pointed out that the intuition supporting the natural reading of a phenomenal term like ‘pain’ is statistically deviant. But this does not matter from the present perspective: for the argument to go through, it suffices to acknowledge that it is at least possible that ‘pain’ refers to a natural phenomenon.
An anonymous referee suggested that Kripke would not need to rely on (5) at all, but rather could simply hold that ‘pain’ is a rigid designator for a mental experience, and not an expression with an (ambiguous) sense to begin with. In my view such a claim is false. If ‘pain’ is a rigid designator for a pain sensation, then why is not ‘water’ a rigid designator for a water sensation or ‘heat’ for a heat sensation? I’d say that in the phenomenal sense each of these terms are in fact rigid designators for sensations, but that in the natural sense, they are rigid designators for natural phenomena. There is simply nothing in the phenomena of pain, water or heat that would justify interpreting ‘pain’ as an unambiguously phenomenal term and ‘water’ and ‘heat’ as unambiguously natural terms. (This is highlighted in the case of ‘heat’, which is often used in everyday speech as a phenomenal term, even though Kripke considers it to be a natural kind term).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank two anonymous referees and prof. Jussi Haukioja for commenting on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This work has been supported by the Academy of Finland (grant 2603101).
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Jylkkä, J. Natural Concepts, Phenomenal Concepts, and the Conceivability Argument. Erkenn 78, 647–663 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9368-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9368-5