Abstract
In recent literature on the metaphysics of consciousness, and in particular on the prospects of physicalism, there are two interesting strands of discussion. One strand concerns the so-called ‘thesis of revelation’, the claim that the essences of phenomenal properties are revealed in experience. The other strand concerns the intuition of dualism, the intuition that consciousness is nonphysical. With a particular focus on the former, this paper advances two main arguments. First, it argues that the thesis of revelation is intuitive; it is part of our ordinary, implicit conception of experience. Second, it brings the two strands of discussion together and puts forward a rational explanation of the intuition of dualism in terms of the intuitiveness of the thesis of revelation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In comparison, the proposition ‘Being a sister is being a sibling’ does not define being a sister. It only describes part of the essence of being a sister.
Throughout the paper, ‘physical’ is understood broadly to include functional properties.
Note that ‘C-fibres firing’ is merely a placeholder for whatever physical properties, including functional properties, turn out to be the essence of the painfulness of pain, assuming physicalism is true.
121 responses were gathered from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants, who were fluent English speakers, were first presented with a vignette which explained the task and contained the following example:
A triangle is, by definition, a closed shape with three sides. Consider the sentence ‘I know that a triangle is a closed shape with three sides, but I don’t know what a triangle really is.’ Although it makes no grammatical errors, this sentence sounds very strange, because if one knows that a triangle is a closed shape with three sides, then one knows what a triangle really is.
After passing trial questions about the vignette, participants were then asked to judge a list of sentences, including (1) and (2), on a scale from 1 to 7, where ‘1’ is ‘This sentence is not strange’ and ‘7’ is ‘This sentence is very strange’. The average ratings for (1) and (2) were 2.98 (SD = 1.79) and 5.69 (SD = 1.64). 70.3% gave (2) a score of 5 or above with 40.5% responding ‘7’. In contrast, only 26.6% gave (1) a score of 5 or above and 57.9% gave it a score of 3 or below.
Participants were also asked about (3) and (4) in the same experiment reported in fn5. The average ratings for (3) and (4) were 2.20 (SD = 1.54) and 5.11 (SD = 1.80). 66% gave (4) a score of 5 or above. In contrast, only 16.6% gave (3) a score of 5 or above and 74.4% gave it a score of 3 or below.
In saying that there is a particular reading of sentence (2), I mean that it is possible to interpret or understand (2) in a particular way.
Instead of ‘really’, other adverbial phrases, such as ‘essentially’, ‘actually’, ‘in fact’, can also be used. Adverbial phrases are not necessary for making claims about something’s essence. Sometimes we can just use the copula ‘is’, as in ‘heat is mean kinetic energy’.
Note also that in the experiment reported in fn5, participants were presented with a vignette which contained an example that explicitly deployed the essential reading of ‘know what X really is’. Given this cueing, the essential reading was likely to be in force when participants judged the relevant sentences.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on examples of this sort.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
Indeed, it does not seem particularly plausible to insist that the general idea of neuroscience is not familiar to us in everyday contexts whereas the idea of an atomistic reality is.
Given both (1) and (2) contrast what X is like, where X is ‘gold’ in (1) and ‘the feeling of an itch’ in (2), with what X really is, and given non-essential readings of the sentences seem cognitively demanding, requiring the interpreter to come up with hypothetical scenarios, it is plausible that the essential reading is the default interpretation of these sentences. Note again that given the vignette reported in fn5, participants likely deployed the essential reading of ‘know what X really is’ when interpreting the relevant sentences.
Note that the explanation for the intuition of dualism put forward here only depends on an implicit appreciation of an alleged incompatibility between revelation and physicalism. Such an implicit appreciation can exist even if revelation turns out to be compatible with physicalism. In other words, the explanation at issue does not depend on whether the argument put forward in Sect. 2 is strictly speaking correct, only that the subject implicitly takes it to be correct. Furthermore, it seems plausible that there is such an implicit appreciation. After all, many philosophers, including physicalists, explicitly endorse the incompatibility between revelation and physicalism (e.g. Braddon-Mitchell 2007; Chalmers 2016, 2018; Goff 2015, 2017; Hill 2014; Lewis 1995; McLaughlin 2001, 2003; Papineau 2020). So, it would seem that the argument from revelation against the claim that phenomenal properties are physical properties, whether or not it is ultimately correct, is certainly compelling enough to be tacitly appreciated by a rational person.
References
Balog, K. (2012). Acquaintance and the mind-body problem. In S. Gozzano & C. S. Hill (Eds.), New perspectives on type identity: the mental and the physical (pp. 16–42). Cambridge University Press.
Braddon-Mitchell, D. (2007). Against ontologically emergent consciousness. In B. McLaughlin & J. Cohen (Eds.), Contemporary debates in philosophy of mind (pp. 287–299). Blackwell.
Bogardus, T. (2013). Undefeated Dualism. Philosophical Studies, 165, 445–466.
Chalmers, D. (2016). The combination problem for panpsychism. In G. Brüntrup & J. Jaskolla (Eds.), Panpsychism: Contemporary perspectives (pp. 179–214). OUP.
Chalmers, D. (2018). The meta-problem of consciousness. Journal of Conscious Studies, 25(9–10), 6–61.
Damnjanovic, N. (2012). Revelation and physicalism. Dialectica, 66(1), 69–91.
Davies, M. (2015). Knowledge (explicit, implicit and tacit): philosophical aspects. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of social and behavioral sciences. Elsevier Ltd.
Fiala, B., Arico, A., & Nichols, S. (2011). On the psychological origins of dualism: Dual-process cognition and the explanatory gap. In E. Slingerland & M. Collard (Eds.), Creating consilience: Issues and case studies in the integration of the sciences and humanities (pp. 88–106). OUP.
Fine, G. (2014). The possibility of inquiry: Meno’s paradox from socrates to sextus. OUP.
Fine, K. (1994). Essence and modality. Philosophical Perspectives, 8, 1–16.
Fine, K. (1995). Senses of Essence. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong, D. Raffman, & N. Asher (Eds.), Modality, morality and belief: Essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus (pp. 53–73). Cambridge University Press.
Gelman, S. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. OUP.
Goff, P. (2011). A posteriori physicalists get our phenomenal concepts wrong. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(2), 191–209.
Goff, P. (2015). Real acquaintance and physicalism. In P. Coates & S. Coleman (Eds.), Phenomenal qualities: Sense, perception, and consciousness (pp. 121–143). OUP.
Goff, P. (2017). Consciousness and fundamental reality. OUP.
Hill, C. (2014). Meaning, mind, and knowledge. OUP.
Horgan, T., & Tienson, J. (2001). Deconstructing new wave materialism. In C. Gillett & B. Loewer (Eds.), Physicalism and its discontents (pp. 307–318). Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, M. B. (2018). Intuitions as inferential judgments. Philosophical Issues, 28(1), 7–29.
Keil, F. C. (1989). Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development. MIT Press.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and necessity. Harvard University Press.
Levine, J. (1983). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64, 354–361.
Lewis, D. (1995). Should a materialist believe in qualia? Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 73(1), 140–144.
Liu, M. (2019). Phenomenal experience and the thesis of revelation. In D. Shottenkirk, M. Curado, & S. Gouveia (Eds.), Perception (pp. 227–251). Routledge.
Liu, M. (2020). Explaining the intuition of revelation. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 27(5–6), 99–107.
Majeed, R. (2017). Ramsey humility: The response from revelation and panpsychism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 47(1), 75–96.
McLaughlin, B. (2001). In defense of new wave materialism. In C. Gillett & B. Loewer (Eds.), Physicalism and its discontents (pp. 319–330). Cambridge University Press.
McLaughlin, B. (2003). Color, consciousness, and color consciousness. In Q. Smith & A. Jokic (Eds.), Consciousness: New philosophical perspectives (pp. 97–154). OUP.
Medin, D. L., & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 179–195). Cambridge University Press.
Nida-Rümelin, M. (2007). Grasping phenomenal properties. In T. Alter & S. Walter (Eds.), Phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge: New essays on consciousness and physicalism (pp. 307–336). OUP.
Papineau, D. (2002). Thinking about consciousness. OUP.
Papineau, D. (2007). Phenomenal and perceptual concepts. In T. Alter & S. Walter (Eds.), Phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge: New essays on consciousness and physicalism (pp. 111–144). OUP.
Papineau, D. (2008). Explanatory gaps and dualistic intuitions. In L. Weiskrantz & M. Davies (Eds.), Frontiers of consciousness (pp. 55–62). OUP.
Papineau, D. (2011). What exactly is the explanatory gap? Philosophia, 39, 5–19.
Papineau, D. (2020). The problem of consciousness. In U. Kriegel (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the philosophy of consciousness (pp. 14–38).
Peacocke, C. (2008). Truly understood. OUP.
Perry, J. (2001). Knowledge, possibility, and consciousness. MIT Press.
Pust, J. (2000). Intuitions as evidence. Garland Publishing.
Pust, J. (2017). ‘Intuition’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/intuition/.
Robinson, H. (2015). Phenomenal qualities: What they must be, and what they cannot be. In P. Coates & S. Coleman (Eds.), Phenomenal qualities: Sense, perception, and consciousness (pp. 103–120). OUP.
Stoljar, D. (2006). Ignorance and imagination: The epistemic origin of the problem of consciousness. OUP.
Stoljar, D. (2009). The argument from revelation. In D. Braddon-Mitchell & R. Nola (Eds.), Conceptual analysis and philosophical naturalism (pp. 113–138). MIT Press.
Stoljar, D. (2018). 'Review of Philip Goff, “Consciousness and Fundamental Reality”’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, [Online] https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/consciousness-and-fundamental-reality/.
Sundström, P. (2008). Is the mystery an illusion? Papineau on the problem of consciousness. Synthese, 163, 133–143.
Sundström, P. (2017). How physicalists can—And cannot—Explain the seeming “absurdity” of physicalism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12394
Sytsma, J., & Machery, E. (2010). Two conceptions of subjective experience. Philosophical Studies, 151(2), 299–327.
Trogdon, K. (2017). Revelation and physicalism. Synthese, 194, 2345–2366.
Weinberg, J. (2007). How to change intuitions empirically without risking scepticism. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 31, 318–341.
Wierzbicka, A. (2010). Experience, evidence, and sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English. OUP.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the philosophy of mind work in progress group at the Australian National University, Dualism in the Twenty-First Century Conference at the Central European University, the Phenomenal Consciousness and Self-Awareness Workshop at the University of Fribourg, and the Phenomenality and Self-Consciousness Workshop and the Mind Readings group at the University of Hertfordshire. I’d like to thank the audiences on these occasions. Thanks also to Sam Coleman, Martin Davies, Jakub Mihalik, and Daniel Stoljar for their valuable written comments on earlier versions of this paper. Finally, I am grateful to helpful and detailed comments from four anonymous reviewers.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Liu, M. Revelation and the intuition of dualism. Synthese 199, 11491–11515 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03299-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03299-x