Abstract
According to experiential revelation, phenomenal concepts reveal the nature of the phenomenal properties they refer to. Some see experiential revelation as posing a direct challenge to physicalism. The basic idea is this: given experiential revelation, were phenomenal properties physical/functional in nature they would be presented as such when you think of them under phenomenal concepts, but phenomenal concepts don’t present their referents in this way. I argue that, while this argument on a plausible reconstruction fails, the thesis of experiential revelation nevertheless indirectly challenges physicalism. In particular, it potentially undermines the so-called phenomenal concept strategy, a key defense maneuver of the physicalist for responding to dualist arguments concerning experience. The moral is that issues concerning revelation do indeed pose a problem for physicalism, but not for the reasons you might think.
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Notes
The ‘thus-and-so’ locution here is a placeholder either for a demonstrative or a demonstrative-free description—I leave the matter open. I treat future instances of the locution in the same way.
Strike* is an indiscriminately necessary property—every entity has the property necessarily. But, while Socrates, for example, has strike* necessarily, he doesn’t have it essentially—it’s not part of what it is to be Socrates that if there are employees behaving in thus-and-so way then there is a strike in virtue of this fact. While something has a property necessarily provided that it has that property essentially, from the fact that something has a property necessarily it doesn’t follow that it has that property essentially (Fine 1994).
Phenomenal red and the property feeling like thus-and-so are distinct, as the former is a property of states while the latter is a property of subjects with states. The same distinction applies to other phenomenal properties.
Here’s how Horgan and Tienson put the idea: “...if indeed phenomenal properties, when conceived under phenomenal concepts, not only are conceived otherwise than as physical-functional properties but also are conceived as they are in themselves, then surely phenomenal properties must be otherwise than physical-functional properties” (2001, p. 311).
Chalmers (2003) is naturally read as claiming that phenomenal concepts provide full essential characterizations of their referents. I read Horgan and Tienson (2001) and Goff (2011, 2015) as staying neutral on whether these characterizations are full or merely partial, and Nida-Rümelin (2007) and Schroer (2010) as claiming that they’re merely partial in nature.
Arnauld offers a similar critique of Descartes’ real distinction argument. Arnauld imagines that, while you might clearly and distinctively understand that a particular triangle is right-angled, you might wrongly think that the Pythagorean theorem doesn’t apply to it. In this case you would wrongly think that the applicability of the theorem falls outside of the triangle’s nature. By analogy, while Descartes clearly and distinctively understands his nature to be something that thinks, he might be wrong in thinking that nothing else belongs to his nature apart from the fact he’s a thinking thing—perhaps the fact that he’s an extended thing also belongs to his nature. Thanks to Martin Hann for pointing me to Arnauld’s discussion.
This isn’t to say, however, that the predicate ‘being Bob’s actual favorite property’ and ‘being blue’ rigidly designate the same property—the property designated by the former is a second-order property while the property designated by the latter isn’t.
Diaz-Leon would add a caveat: knowing \({<}\hbox {p}{>}\) counts as knowing part of the nature phenomenal red provided that \({<}\hbox {p}{>}\) plays a role in determining the content of phenomenal red. Why the caveat? Well, suppose that bill’s actual favorite property refers to phenomenal red* and let \({<}\hbox {p}^{*}{>}\) represent the fact that phenomenal red has phenomenal red* essentially, where this proposition is structured by phenomenal red and bill’s actual favrorite property. Both Goff and Diaz-Leon seem to agree in this case that if you know \({<}\hbox {p}^{*}{>}\) you don’t thereby know part of the nature of phenomenal red. Diaz-Leon suggests that the reason why is that \({<}\hbox {p}^{*}{>}\) doesn’t play a role in determining the content of phenomenal red for you. The same considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, to \({<}\hbox {q}{>}\) and knowing part of the nature of \(P_{1}\). This proposal strikes me as plausible, but I gloss over it above.
See Balog (2009) for further discussion of this aspect of PCS.
For a discussion of acquaintance understood as a primitive cognitive relation and how this relates to PCS, see Levine (2007).
It’s potentially misleading to speak of the phenomenal concept strategy, as there are different ways of understanding the strategy’s goal as well as just what we’re allowed to appeal to in trying to achieve the goal. A relatively unambitious conception of the goal is this: our job is just to explain why phenomenal and physical/functional concepts are conceptually isolated (Diaz-Leon 2010). A relatively ambitious conception is this: our job includes explaining not only what I call our epistemic/semantic situation but also why we have the experiential knowledge that we do (Chalmers 2007). A relatively restrictive take on what we’re allowed to appeal to is this: we must work with topic-neutral characterizations of both phenomenal concepts and our epistemic/semantic situation, where a characterization is topic-neutral when it’s free of experiential terminology (Chalmers 2007). A relatively unrestrictive take is this: we’re allowed to appeal to the idea that phenomenal properties are by their nature connected to particular feelings. My discussion of PCS in this paper addresses a particular approach to the strategy’s goals and assumptions, one that falls in between the takes just described and hews closely to Balog’s description of the strategy.
If a property has the property being a physical/functional property then the former has the latter essentially. And a concept provides a physical/functional characterization of its referent just in case it represents its referent as being a physical/functional property. Hence, if a concept provides a physical/functional characterization of its referent then it provides an essential characterization of its referent. Returning to (ii) from above, it follows that (ii) is true only if the physical/functional concept that refers to P doesn’t provide a physical/functional characterization of its referent. (Note that the truth of (ii) is compatible with the idea that you’re disposed to infer that the property in question is a physical/functional property—what’s required is just that this disposition isn’t meaning-constitutive with respect to the concept.) I assume that certain physical/functional concepts don’t provide essential characterizations of their referents such as neuron (more on neuron shortly). If this is right then there are physical/functional concepts that don’t provide physical/functional characterizations of their referents either.
This proposal is close to what Balog (2012b) proposes. While she rejects experiential revelation, she claims that phenomenal concepts seem to provide essential characterizations of their referents, and this appearance of essential characterization explains certain features of our epistemic/semantic situation. We will return to Balog on PCS shortly. For an attempt to implement PCS in a way that doesn’t appeal to experiential revelation (either the idea that the thesis is true or that it merely seems true), see (Papineau 2002, Chap. 6).
Thanks to Martin Hann for helpful discussion here.
Why can’t the advocate of PCS just say that the referent of phenomenal red has some essential property and the concept characterizes its referent as having this property? The problem is that this isn’t an explanation of experiential revelation but merely a statement of it.
A related proposal: phenomenal red characterizes its referent as being (among other things) a property that stands in this relation (the relation of being phenomenally more similar to __ than __) to that property (phenomenal orange) and this property (phenomenal green). While the notion of phenomenal similarity in this case doesn’t figure into the content of phenomenal red, the proposal nevertheless appeals to the idea that phenomenal red has an experiential nature.
Schroer (2010) proposes that, while the characterizations that phenomenal concepts like phenomenal red provide of their referents are substantive, more specific phenomenal concepts like determinate warmth provide relatively thin characterizations of their referents. His version of the thick demonstrative view is intended to apply only to phenomenal concepts that provide substantive characterizations of their referents. Whether or not the characterization that determinate warmth provides of its referent is substantive in the relevant sense (see Veillet forthcoming for a discussion of just what the relevant sense of the term might be), what’s important for our purposes is that determinate warmth provides an essential rather than non-essential characterization of its referent.
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Acknowledgments
I presented versions of this paper at the Philosophy of Mind Workshop at Virginia Tech (April 2015), the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (April 2015), and (via Skype) the Victoria University of Wellington (May 2013). I wish to thank my audience members and particularly Martin Hann—my commentator at the SSPP—for helpful feedback. Special thanks to Nathan Adams, Louise Antony, Stuart Brock, Sam Cowling, Tim Fuller, Brie Gertler, Philip Goff, Ben Jantzen, Daniel Kraemer, Joseph Levine, Tristram McPherson, Gregory Novack, Ted Parent, Nathan Rockwood, and two anonymous referees for their help.
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Trogdon, K. Revelation and physicalism. Synthese 194, 2345–2366 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1055-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1055-7