Abstract
Knowledge of what it’s like to have perceptual experiences, e.g. of what it’s like to see red or taste Turkish coffee, is phenomenal knowledge; and it is knowledge the substantial or significant nature of which is widely assumed to pose a challenge for physicalism. Call this the New Challenge to physicalism. The goal of this paper is to take a closer look at the New Challenge. I show, first, that it is surprisingly difficult to spell out clearly and neutrally what the New Challenge is in fact urging the physicalist to explain. What initially look like plausible or promising ways of making sense of it turn out to be either question begging or insufficient to generate a challenge to physicalism at all. I go on to suggest that what the New Challenge may be asking the physicalist to explain may be the fact that we come to token certain higher-order judgments about the significance of phenomenal knowledge. I end with a discussion of the implications of this interpretation of the New Challenge—which turns out to be as much a challenge for the anti-physicalist as it is for the physicalist.
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Notes
I take broadly physical properties or facts to include neural, functional and representational properties or facts.
So-called type-A materialists will insist that the contents of phenomenal concepts are in fact a priori deducible from the contents of physical/functional concepts. The Gap therefore poses a challenge only to type-B materialists who do think that phenomenal concepts are not a priori deducible from physical/functional ones and find themselves having to explain why that should be. This paper is, unsurprisingly, focused on the debate between type-B materialists and anti-physicalists.
See Chalmers and Jackson (2001) for discussion.
This is how Balog (2009, 309) characterizes it, though it should be noted that Levine emphasized the substantiveness of phenomenal concepts in his early discussion of the “standard” Explanatory Gap: see his 2001.
All emphases in the following quotes are mine unless otherwise noted.
As mentioned in Sect.1.1, accounts of what makes phenomenal concepts special fall roughly into two categories: demonstrative/recognitional accounts and quotational/constitutional accounts. For reasons of space, I focus here mostly on demonstrative account, which isn’t to say that the New Challenge is not in fact leveled against constitutional accounts as well. In fact it is (see Levine 2007). For this reason my critical discussion of the New Challenge generally should be of interest to proponents of quotational/constitutional accounts as well.
Chalmers (2007) explicitly presents this as a Master Argument against the physicalist’s phenomenal concept strategy, regardless of the detail of their particular account (the Master Argument is supposed to work against quotational/constitutional accounts). See Carruthers and Veillet (2007), Diaz-Leon (2010), Balog (2012a) for explicit discussion of Chalmers Master Argument.
That is, after all, part of the very title of his paper: “Where’s the Beef? Phenomenal Concepts as Both Demonstrative and Substantial”.
We can agree that this is a good criterion for determining whether two sentences differ in cognitive significance even if we disagree about how Frege’s puzzle should ultimately be solved. Note that endorsing this criterion is by no means unusual in this discussion—see Tye (2000, 2009), Block (2007), etc., especially since, as was mentioned earlier, we are interested in individuating knowledge in a fine-grained, Fregean way.
Some interesting questions about what counts as a new property for a given thinker. It can’t be that it’s a new property as in one the thinker never even knew existed at all; for in that sense, Mary cannot learn anything new when she leaves her room even for a dualist (she certainly knew that color experiences had phenomenal properties). It can’t really be either that a property is new for a given thinker if that thinker has never managed to refer to it before—it seems that Mary manages to refer to phenomenal red from inside the room (even if dualism is true), after all she can think that ripe tomatoes typically give rise in normally perceivers to experiences with phenomenal red properties. I pursue questions about the newness of properties elsewhere.
For an obvious example: you do not challenge a theist by asking her to explain to why God does not exist; rather you challenge her to explain something she should want to explain, such as, e.g. the existence of evil.
Obviously assuming that a reasonable person: someone could always deny having to explain something.
After all, the title of Goff’s (2011) is “A posteriori Physicalists Get Our Phenomenal Concepts Wrong”.
This is not to say that Goff doesn’t provide good reasons for doubting the plausibility of the physicalists (type-B materialists)’s account of phenomenal concepts. This is a discussion worth having in its own right (see Diaz-Leon 2014 for an interesting response), but the notion of translucency cannot possibly help us characterize the New Challenge.
These modes of presentation are close to what Block calls Conceptual Modes of Presentation (2007, 261).
By contrast, modes of presentation individuated coarsely are related to what Bock calls Metaphysical Modes of Presentations. “The importantly different, non-Fregean, and less familiar mode of presentation, the [Metaphysical Mode of Presentation], is a property of the referent.” (Block 2007, 261) I should point out that coarsely individuated modes of presentations need not be properties of the referents (though they could be); after all, mental representations could be individuated coarsely in the sense used here.
Again, I do not claim that Levine is actually construing the Challenge this way. I am using some of his claims to illustrate what the Significance Challenge can’t amount to.
Notice obviously that we only have access to Mary’s own higher-order beliefs/judgments about her own knowledge via our own imagination of what she would say and do in that situation.
In what follows, I use the phrase “higher-order judgment” to refer to various higher-order emotions, feelings, reactions, intuitions and beliefs. The particular interaction between these states, especially the connection between Mary’s own higher-order belief in this case and her epistemic emotions is something that would be well worth thinking about in more detail elsewhere.
Levine talks about a sense that a certain new belief expresses something—of course it’s hard to know exactly what this type of “sense” is. I choose in the paper to talk about higher-order judgments. This is not to say that there aren’t other interesting epistemic states at play in the case of Mary: for instance, the epistemic emotion of surprise would naturally be especially relevant in this particular context.
This is an observation that is, as far as I can tell, almost entirely ignored in the discussion though it should not. When people claim that phenomenal knowledge is substantive they seem to think that all phenomenal knowledge is equally substantive, and that it is substantive in the way Mary’s first knowledge of red obviously is. But thinking about the range of new phenomenal knowledge reveals that we would not consider all new phenomenal knowledge equally substantive.
Nida-Rümelin (2010) herself notes that “there has not been much discussion of the knowledge argument from a dualist perspective” and that examples of “positive dualist account of phenomenal concepts, phenomenal properties and their relations such that on that account Mary does learn new and nonphysical facts upon release” are “hard to find.” To her credit, she does provide a detailed account of grasping (Nida-Rümelin 2007).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer to pressing me on this point.
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the University of Michigan-Flint's Office of Research for their supporting grant, to my colleagues (especially Erica Britt) for help on earlier drafts, and to anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
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Veillet, B. The cognitive significance of phenomenal knowledge. Philos Stud 172, 2955–2974 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0451-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0451-z