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Goff’s revelation thesis and the epistemology of colour discrimination

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Abstract

In this paper, I raise an objection to Philip Goff’s “Revelation Thesis” as articulated in his Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. In Sect. 1 I present the Revelation Thesis in the context of Goff’s broader defence of pan-psychism. In Sect. 2 I argue that the Revelation Thesis entails the identity of indiscriminable phenomenal properties. In Sect. 3 I argue that the identity of indiscriminable phenomenal properties is false. The upshot is that the Revelation Thesis is false.

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Notes

  1. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this sort of example.

  2. One concern that might be raised here is that Goff does not seem to have considered any other explanations. A famous objection to the procedure of inference to the best explanation is that in this sort of inference we may just be choosing “the best of a bad lot” (Van Fraassen 1989, p. 143). Surely if anyone is susceptible to this sort of objection, it is the person considering just one explanation.

  3. I acknowledge that “indiscriminability” ordinarily carries a modal connotation: ie. being able to discriminate. However, since the revelation thesis claims that the concept user has certain knowledge with respect to which phenomenal properties are being instantiated in the conscious state to which she is attending, this simpler version will suffice.

  4. Armstrong, Dummett, Wright, Williamson, and Goodman, mentioned above, all defend non-transitivity of indiscriminability, as do a number of others. See, for example: Chuard (2010), Clark (1989), Deutsch (2005), Hellie (2005), Keefe (2011) and Pelling (2008).

  5. Technically, the revelation thesis is not concerned specifically with change so much as it is concerned with difference in general in this context.

  6. Note that Mills is responding to Sorites style arguments in the literature on vagueness that reference this phenomenon. Hence his mention of a paradox.

  7. The fact that I am not sure how many is itself a problem for the revelation thesis. Shouldn’t I know with “rational certainty” exactly how many hues composed this phenomenal experience?.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The University of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall, Buchanan E370, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, UK

    Gerrit Neels

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Thanks to Murat Aydede and two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

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Neels, G. Goff’s revelation thesis and the epistemology of colour discrimination. Synthese 199, 14371–14382 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03425-9

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