Papineau on phenomenal concepts

David Papineau has put online his paper "Phenomenal and Perceptual Concepts", forthcoming next year in the Alter/Walter collection Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism.  In the paper he extends and elaborates the "quotational concepts" view he put forward in his 2002 book Thinking about Consciousness, and uses it to answer various anti-materialist challenges.  In the last section of the paper, he tries to use the account to answer the challenge I put forward in "Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap", posted here earlier this year, and forthcoming in the same volume.

In that paper, I argued that accounts of phenomenal concepts that attempt to explain away the explanatory gap face a dilemma: either there is an epistemic gap between P (physical processes) and C (the relevant features of phenomenal concepts), or there's not.  If the former, then the relevant features of phenomenal concepts can't be physically explained.  If the latter, then there's an epistemic gap between C and E (the epistemic feature we face with regard to consciousness), so that C can't be used to explain our epistemic situation.  In his paper, Papineau claims to embrace both horns (!) of the dilemma.  A response (adapted from recent correspondence with Papineau) is after the fold.

Although Papineau says he takes both horns of the dilemma, I think it's clear that he really takes the second horn.  His embracing of the first horn requires that C employs the concept "phenomenal concept", but this is explicitly excluded (in my section on the first horn), as employing that concept would trivially yield an epistemic gap between P and C.  Rather, C should be cast in more general architectural terms.  It's not stipulated that it has to be a physical/functional account: it may make reference to various general conceptual and epistemic features, as long as it doesn't explicitly employ the notion of the phenomenal.

Some of Papineau's discussion of the second horn is somewhat tangential. E.g. he appeals to the metaphysical impossibility of zombies, but this isn't relevant here, since all occurrences of zombies in the argument are within the scope of a conceivability operator, and Papineau accepts that metaphysical impossibility is compatible with conceivability.  To take the second horn successfully, he needs to make the case that P&~E is not conceivable, where E is cast in general epistemic terms, and he doesn't quite try to do that here.

It looks like Papineau thinks that upon examination, any conceivable zombie will share the relevant epistemic features with us, though directed at "schmonsciousness" rather than consciousness. Again, I discuss this move in the paper (under option 3), and it's not really clear to me what his reply is to the discussion there (though I think he takes what I call the "inflationary" option).  I presume that he'd say that there's some sort of transparent explanation of the zombie's (and our) epistemic features in physical and functional terms, so that we can't really conceive of zombies that lack them.  But he doesn't really explain how this would go, or explain away the intuition to the contrary.  Perhaps he might take the option of conceding conceivability while rejecting the link between conceivability and transparent explanation, but even so the same sort of issue arises.

To put things independently of conceivability: what's required is a clear architectural explanation of just why we should expect that the quotational (or use/mention) structure he invokes should ground direct, semantically stable reference to the quoted state (whether in conscious beings, silicon zombies, or whatever), without presupposing that the state is conscious, or simply assuming some sort of special acquaintance with that state, or anything like that.  Prima facie, as I say in the last section of the paper, all one would expect this structure to yield is some sort of quasi-indexical or demonstrative reference that does not ground any substantive knowledge of the state.  Certainly, one wouldn't expect semantically stable reference to such a state, any more than one would expect it for indexicals or demonstratives.  Papineau needs to meet this burden both to address my argument and for his explanatory project to go through more generally.  Of course I think that the burden can't be met, for the reasons I give in the paper.  But it would be interesting to see an attempt.

Comments

[David Papineau]

Thanks for your useful comments on my paper. I’ve been thinking about them. I agree the interesting questions are to do with whether zombies share our epistemic situation. But let me first say something about conceivability and explanation.

I. Some of the things I say about your paper stem from my take on the ‘explanatory gap’. I don’t accept that the conceivability gap between the physical and the phenomenal constitutes any kind of epistemological or explanatory gap. In my view, when people say they feel an ‘explanatory gap’, they are simply expressing a deep-seated dualist intuition whose source lies elsewhere. In the absence of this independent dualist intuition, we wouldn’t feel that physical-phenomenal identities were explanatorily deficient or epistemologically inaccessible, simply on account of their conceivable falsity.

So in general I don’t accept that we are stuck with residual explanatory problems, whenever the ‘phenomenal concepts’ strategy turns out still to leave us with physical duplicates that are conceivably phenomenally different.

(OK—I know I’ve never persuaded anybody much of my ‘antipathetic’ account of the source of my posited prior dualist intuition. But wait—I’m working on a nice paper which steps back from the question of why we have this supposed intuition, and simply aims to show that everybody, including paid-up physicalists, are in its grip.)

You worry about what dialectical work phenomenal concepts are doing, for someone who denies the conceivability-explanation connection, and so don’t use them to deal with explanatory/epistemological problems supposedly occasioned by the conceivability gap. My answer: they are crucial to explaining the prior intuition of dualism (and also, if the question is raised, to explaining why physical-phenomenal identities are arguably peculiar among a posteriori necessities in involving no semantic instability).)

This take on the ‘explanatory gap’ explains why I’m happy to embrace the first horn of your dilemma as well as the second. In discussing the first horn, you specify that C shouldn’t be understood so as to conceptually require phenomenality, so as to give us Type-Bs a fair chance of avoiding the first horn. That’s a generous offer, but since I don’t accept that the conceivability of P&-C automatically generates explanatory or epistemological gaps, I’m happy to understand C as conceptually requiring phenomenality, and not particularly fussed that this puts me on the first horn.

II. Now for the epistemic situation of zombies. I agree, as you observe towards the end of your paper, that even apart from conceivability-explanation issues, the Type-B physicalist can be faced with a directly explanatory question: how can a physically explicable C explain our epistemic situation, given that zombies will have C but not share that epistemic situation?

(Though doesn’t this question need to be focussed specifically on silicon zombies, rather than full-on ones, once the conceivability-explanation connection is denied? That’s how it seemed to me in my paper. I don’t see that any explanatory challenge is raised by the mere conceivability of full-on zombies with C who lack our epistemic situation, since I think that’s consistent with C explaining the epistemic situation that we necessarily share with our physical duplicates.)

So the real issue is with silicon zombies, who look as if they would share C yet really lack our epistemic situation. They would seem to lack the intimate epistemic connection with their ‘schenomenal’ states that we have to our phenomenal states.

My line, as you observe, is to respond that in truth silicon zombies would share our epistemic situation. In this connection, you press me for a fuller account of the special semantic stability of our phenomenal concepts, which you take to require that we have some especially intimate epistemic acquaintance with our own phenomenal states.

OK. I say that phenomenal concepts strike us as especially semantically stable simply because they ‘quote’ their referents (their exercises are inevitably accompanied by (a version of) the phenomenal states they mention). In so far as we conceive of phenomenal concepts as essentially involving this feature, we will suppose that the phenomenal concept pain, say, will inevitably refer to the property pain, however the actual facts turn out—otherwise it wouldn’t be that concept. I don’t see that this story demands any especially intimate epistemic acquaintance with the phenomenal property pain, certainly not some kind of acquaintance that would guarantee knowledge of all its essential features. Why you can’t refer to pain by so quoting it, and yet remain ignorant of the fact that it is identical to C-fibres firing? (NB—take ‘quotation’ with a pinch of salt here—I don’t really think there is any good mental analogue of linguistic quotation—my thought is solely that exercises of phenomenal concepts are accompanied by versions of their referents.)

You feel that a thin account of phenomenal concepts, that allows them to be shared by silicon zombies, will only yield some ‘blind’ indexical/demonstrative knowledge, which falls short of own epistemic situation. I now agree (in my new paper) that ‘blind’ demonstrative knowledge is a lousy account of what Mary learns. But I don’t see why a thin bottom-up account should leave the silicon zombies with only blind demonstration. On my current account, phenomenal reference requires activation of sensory patterns, which activation will then (‘quotationally’) instance the states referred to. Even for zombies, that kind of reference is quite different from mere ‘blind’ demonstration, which they (like us) can do without any sensory activation.

Still, you will say, won’t their reference still be ‘blind’ in the sense that it would be epistemically just the same for them if we substituted a different neural state as the target of their ‘schenomenal’ thinking? I say no—given the ‘quotational’ feature of their ‘schenomenal’ concepts, that would require that they be thinking with a different concept, which I take it would make a real epistemic difference.

Maybe the silicon zombies don’t have, as you put it, ‘substantive knowledge of the state’s intrinsic character’. But I dispute that we have this ourselves, in the relevant sense. Phenomenal thinking connects us (and the silicon zombies) intimately to phenomenal (‘schenomenal’) states only in the sense that the thinking will inevitably be accompanied by the states themselves—but, as I said earlier, it seems to me unwarranted to infer from this that phenomenal thinking must acquaint us with all the essential features of phenomenal states.

[Ram Lakhan Pandey Vimal]

If I understand correctly, according to Papineau, the prior intuition of dualism (such as property dualism, subjective experiences are irreducible) is the major cause of Levine’s explanatory gap. This means that Type-B materialists who lack this intuition think fundamentally different from the anti-materialists who are unable to eliminate it. Thus, the prospects for reaching any single, agreed, view independent framework appears remote unless some criterion for an optimal framework (such as with the least number of problems) is accepted by both views. Furthermore, in the second horn, it is still not clear to me that how zombies can fully share our epistemic situation.

[Note: please delete my previous comment.]