An Analysis of Qualitative Feel As the Introspectible Subjective Aspect of a Space of Reasons

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

An Analysis of Qualitative Feel As the Introspectible Subjective Aspect of a Space of Reasons An Analysis of Qualitative Feel as the Introspectible Subjective Aspect of a Space of Reasons Michael James Stuart Beaton Submitted for examination in the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, April, 2009 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted, in whole or in part, to this or any other University for the award of any other degree. Signature: ................................................ An Analysis of Qualitative Feel as the Introspectible Subjective Aspect of a Space of Reasons Michael James Stuart Beaton Summary This thesis presents an analysis of qualitative feel (‘qualia’), based on a Sellarsian ‘space of reasons’ account of the mental. The first non-introductory chapter, Chapter 2, argues against an over-strong phenomenal realism (the claim that inverted spectra, zombies, etc., are at least conceptually possible), and against the modern phenomenal concept defence of such claims. Nevertheless, it is agreed with the proponents of these views that we must allow for introspective knowledge of our qualia, if we are to take qualia seriously at all. It is therefore proposed that we allow our search for qualia to be guided by some independently plausible theory of introspection. In Chapter 3, Shoemaker’s account of introspection is presented, extended in certain respects, and defended against some current objections. Chapter 4 is used to argue that Shoemaker’s current account of qualia can only be made compatible with his account of introspection by paying certain very high costs (which Shoemaker is aware of, but seems willing to pay). However, it is also argued that Shoemaker’s account of qualia has some attractive features, which can be preserved. In Chapter 5 a novel analysis of qualia is presented, as non-intrinsic (i.e. relational), introspectible aspects of mind, fully capturable at the level of a ‘space of reasons’ analysis of an agent. A detailed analysis is given, for the cases of colour qualia and of pains. The aforementioned, attractive features of Shoemaker’s account are adapted, in order to address some of the complexities of the different ways in which we can think about such qualitative properties. In Chapter 6, it is argued that this account of qualia has the potential to explain plausibly many of our problematic intuitions concerning qualia including: their ineffability; our ability to know them infallibly and incorrigibly; and (though only in weak senses) their intrinsicness and privacy. Submitted for examination in the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, April, 2009 i Acknowledgements Acknowledgements I would like to thank my two supervisors, Steve Torrance and Ron Chrisley, for their encouragement and support. I would also like to thank Steve for deciding to take a chance on me as I returned to academia after an extended break. Amongst my fellow graduate students over the years at Sussex, I would like to thank the following for many discussions and for invaluable feedback on written work: Tom Beament, Rob Clowes, Chris Davia, Chrisantha Fernando, Tom Froese, Hanne De Jaegher, Miriam Kyselo, Rowan Lovett, Marek McGann, Simon McGregor, Tony Morse, Will Newhouse, Joel Parthemore, Alexandra Penn, Marieke Rohde, Nathaniel Virgo and Alexandros Zographakis. Thanks, too, to all the other members of the various research, reading and discussion groups at Sussex who have given feedback and generally created a friendly and intellectually stimulating research environment, including all the members of PAICS, E-Intentionality, CogPhi, CCNR, Life and Mind and PAC Lab. I owe Inman Harvey here at Sussex more than, I think, he realizes. I am deeply indebted to him for some two or three years of patient conversation, during which he successfully convinced me that there was something fundamentally wrong with the representationalist assumptions underpinning most theorizing in cognitive science; and – though I hesitate to mention this – he also made sure that I realized that I needed to be much more careful in my thinking, as I moved between mind talk and brain talk. This would not have been the thesis it is, without his input. I would like to thank Lucy Allais for running the graduate philosophy class which introduced me to McDowell. Many established academics from other Universities have been extremely generous with their time, at one point or another, in allowing me to work through details of their ideas (or mine!) by email, or during face to face conversation, including: Torin Alter, Uzi Awret, Ned Block, Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Marco Giunti, Germund Hesslow, Nicholas Humphrey, Dan Lloyd, Thomas Metzinger, Alva Noë, Chris Nunn, Kevin O’Regan and David Rosenthal. ii Acknowledgements My thanks to David Chalmers for deciding that there was something worth saying in the first version of my RoboDennett paper (but also for helping me to understand how much needed doing to turn it into a publishable paper). I would especially like to thank Romi Nijhawan and Beena Khurana for providing an extremely constructive and supportive atmosphere, within their research group, into which I was welcomed as I explored psychophysics for a period of around a year, during the course of my DPhil research. (Romi, we will get that red-green flash-lag data written up as a journal paper, now that I have submitted!) My thanks to Zoltan Dienes for also providing help and guidance in this area. Very grateful thanks to my sister, Caroline, for several instances of specific and invaluable support, as I tried to work out how to manage my time and move forward with this research; and, for that matter, for helpful tips on public speaking! This work was financially supported (during the second and third of the three full- time years allocated for DPhil research) by a Graduate Teaching Assistantship awarded by the former School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS) at the University of Sussex. COGS (formerly) and Informatics (latterly) have also been generous in provision of funding to attend various academic conferences over the years. The James S. McDonnell Foundation and the European Science Foundation were kind enough to provide funding to attend two separate but equally invaluable Summer Schools, each of which brought together early-career and established researchers from philosophy and neuroscience. iii Preface Preface The bulk of Chapter 2 (specifically, Section 2.2) is in press elsewhere (Beaton, in press). A large portion of Chapter 6 (Section 6.4) is already in print (Beaton, 2005). These papers were produced as an integral part of the present thesis research. Copyright in these papers has been assigned to the publishers of the Journal of Consciousness Studies , and they are included herein with permission for non-commercial distribution only. iv Table of Contents Table of Contents Summary...................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... ii Preface........................................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents........................................................................................................ v 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Introductory Remarks.................................................................................... 1 1.2 Chapter Overview ......................................................................................... 3 1.2.1 Chapter 2 – Background Issues.............................................................. 3 1.2.2 Chapter 3 – Introspection....................................................................... 4 1.2.3 Chapter 4 – Shoemaker’s New Account of Qualia ................................. 6 1.2.4 Chapter 5 – A Space of Reasons Analysis of Qualia .............................. 8 1.2.5 Chapter 6 – Reclaiming Qualia ............................................................ 12 1.2.6 Appendix – Noë on Experience ........................................................... 16 1.3 Original Contributions................................................................................. 17 1.3.1 Chapter 2............................................................................................. 17 1.3.2 Chapter 3............................................................................................. 17 1.3.3 Chapter 4............................................................................................. 18 1.3.4 Chapter 5............................................................................................. 18 1.3.5 Chapter 6............................................................................................. 19 1.3.6 Appendix............................................................................................. 20 2. Background Issues ............................................................................................ 21 2.1 Introduction................................................................................................. 21 2.2 Qualia and Introspection.............................................................................. 21 2.2.1 Abstract for this Section ...................................................................... 21 2.2.2 Overview............................................................................................
Recommended publications
  • The Inverted Spectrum Sydney Shoemaker the Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 79, No. 7. (Jul., 1982), Pp. 357-381
    The Inverted Spectrum Sydney Shoemaker The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 79, No. 7. (Jul., 1982), pp. 357-381. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%28198207%2979%3A7%3C357%3ATIS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F The Journal of Philosophy is currently published by Journal of Philosophy, Inc.. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/jphil.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Wed Apr 4 09:58:34 2007 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME LXXIX, NO. 7, JULY 1982 THE INVERTED SPECTRUM* s best I can determine, the idea of spectrum inversion made its first appearance in the philosophical literature when A John Locke, in the Essay, entertained the possibility that "the same Object should flroduce in several Men's Minds different Ideas at the same time; v.g.
    [Show full text]
  • QUALIA: What It Is Like to Have an Experience
    QUALIA: What it is like to have an experience Qualia include the ways things look, sound and smell, the way it feels to have a pain, and more generally, what it's like to have experiential mental states. (‘Qualia’ is the plural of ‘quale’.) Qualia are experiential properties of sensations, feelings, perceptions and, more controversially, thoughts and desires as well. But, so defined, who could deny that qualia exist? Although the existence of subjective experience is not (or anyway should not be) controversial, ‘quale’—which is more clearly a technical term than ‘subjective experience’ is more often used by those who are inclined to reject the common-sense conception of subjective experience. Here is a first approximation to a statement of what is controversial: whether the phenomenology of experience can be exhaustively analyzed in intentional, functional or purely cognitive terms. Opponents of qualia think that the phenomenology of an experience can be exhaustively analyzed in terms of its representational or intentional content (“representationism”); or that the phenomenology of experience can be exhaustively analyzed in terms of its causal role (“functionalism”), or that having a subjective experiential state can be exhaustively analyzed in terms of having a state that is cognitively monitored in a certain way or accompanied by a thought to the effect that I have that state. If we include in the definition of ‘qualia’ the idea that the phenomenology of experience outruns such intentional, functional and cognitive analyses, then it is controversial whether there are qualia. This definition of `qualia' is controversial in a respect that is familiar in philosophy.
    [Show full text]
  • The Logic of Qualia 1 Introduction
    The Logic of Qualia Drew McDermott, 2014-08-14 Draft! Comments welcome! Do not quote! Abstract: Logic is useful as a neutral formalism for expressing the contents of mental representations. It can be used to extract crisp conclusions regarding the higher- order theory of phenomenal consciousness developed in (McDermott, 2001, 2007). A key aspect of conscious perceptions is their connection to the distinction between appearance and reality. Perceptions must often be corrected. To do so requires that the logic of perception be able to represent the logical structure of judgment events, that is, to include the formulas of the logic as objects to be reasoned about. However, there is a limit to how finely humans can examine their own represen- tations. Terms representing primary and secondary qualities seemed to be locked, so that the numbers (or levels of neural activation) that are their essence are not directly accessible. Humans feel a need to invoke “intrinsic,” “nonrelational” prop- erties of many secondary qualities — their qualia — to “explicate” how we compare and discriminate among them, although this is not actually how the comparisons are accomplished. This model of qualia explains several things: It accounts for the difference between “normal” and “introspective” access to a perceptual module in terms of quotation. It dissolves Jackson’s knowledge argument by explaining what Mary learns as a fictional but undoubtable belief structure. It makes spectrum in- version logically impossible by providing a degree of freedom between the physical structure of the brain and the representations it contains that redescribes putative cases of spectrum inversion as alternative but equivalent ways of mapping physical states to representational states.
    [Show full text]
  • Zombies and the Function of Consciousness Owen Flanagan
    © 1 9 9 5 P o l g e r a n d F l a n a g a n Zombies and the Function of Consciousness Owen Flanagan Departments of Philosophy, Psychology, and Neurobiology, Email: [email protected]. and Thomas Polger Department of Philosophy, Email:[email protected], Box 90743 Duke University, Durham, NC, 27707, USA.* Abstract: Todd Moody’s Zombie Earth thought experiment is an attempt to show that ‘conscious inessentialism’ is false or in need of qualification. We defend conscious inessentialism against his criticisms, and argue that zombie thought experiments highlight the need to explain why consciousness evolved and what function(s) it serves. This is the hardest problem in consciousness studies. 1. Conscious Inessentialism Conscious inessentialism is “the view that for any intelligent activity i , performed in any cognitive domain d , even if we do i with conscious accompaniments, i can in principle be done without these conscious accompaniments.”1 Among other things, conscious inessentialism forces questions about the function, and thus the adaptiveness and evolutionary significance, of consciousness. This is because conscious inessentialism just is the claim that consciousness is not metaphysically or logically necessary. It is * The order of authors follows alphabetical convention. Authorship is completely equal. 1 Flanagan, O. Consciousness Reconsidered. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 5. 1 © 1 9 9 5 P o l g e r a n d F l a n a g a n not necessary in all possible worlds where creatures who are functionally equivalent to us exist. But consciousness did emerge in this actual world—possibly among many species.
    [Show full text]
  • Wittgenstein and Qualia1
    Philosophical Perspectives, 21, Philosophy of Mind, 2007 WITTGENSTEIN AND QUALIA1 Ned Block New York University (Wittgenstein, 1968) endorsed one kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis and rejected another. This paper argues that the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis that Wittgenstein endorsed (the “innocuous” inverted spectrum hypothesis) is the thin end of the wedge that precludes a Wittgensteinian critique of the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis he rejected (the “dangerous” kind). The danger of the dangerous kind is that it provides an argument for qualia, where qualia are (for the purposes of this paper) contents of experiential states which cannot be fully captured in natural language. I will pinpoint the difference between the innocuous and dangerous scenarios that matters for the argument for qualia, give arguments in favor of the coherence and possibility of the dangerous scenario, and try to show that some standard arguments against inverted spectra are ineffective against the version of the dangerous scenario I will be advocating. The leading idea of the paper is that an argument for qualia based on spectrum inversion does not require that the inversion be behaviorally indistinguishable. At one crucial point, I will rely on a less controversial version of an argument I gave in Block (1999). Wittgenstein’s views provide a convenient starting point for a paper that is much more about qualia than about Wittgenstein. 1. Introduction The content of an experiential state can often be described in public language partly in terms of qualities of objects that bear some salient relation to the state, for example, “looks red” or “feels like sandpaper” or “smells rotten”, but it is the contention of this paper that public language terms including terms for such properties of objects do not fully capture the contents.
    [Show full text]
  • The Inverted Spectrum
    The Nature of Consciousness Handout [19] Sydney Shoemaker: The Inverted Spectrum JeeLoo Liu § The Goals 1. To argue for the logical possibility of spectrum inversion. 2. To defend functionalism against the arguments from inverted spectrum. 3. To give a functionalistic analysis of qualia. § Qualia and Functionalism "Qualia": ___ The qualitative or phenomenal features of sense-experience, in virtue of which they resemble and differ from each other, qualitatively, in the ways they do. "Functionalism": ___ Mental states are definable in terms of their causal relations to sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and other mental states. * The Claim (made by others): ___ Qualia are not functionally definable, as seen from the possibility of qualia inversion. But qualia are real; thus, functionalism is insufficient. § Note: Block and Fodor's Arguments against Functionalism: (from Shoemaker, 'Functionalism and Qualia') [A] The Inverted Qualia Argument ___ 1. It is possible that every person does, in fact, have slightly different qualia. ___ 2. If (1), then qualia inversion is also possible. ___ 3. But nothing would be a token of the type 'red sensation' unless it is a quale of red sensation. ___ 4. So in cases of qualia inversion, the two functionally identical states that are felt differently cannot be states of the same type. ___ 5. And yet, under functionalism, those two states would be of the same type. ___ 6. Therefore, functionalism is false. [B] The Absent Qualia Argument 2 ___ 1. Under functionalism, it is possible that two functionally identical states do not share a given qualitative content. ___ 2. If it is possible that two functionally identical states do not share a given qualitative content, then it is also possible that only one of them has a qualitative content.
    [Show full text]
  • A Puzzle About Further Facts∗
    A Puzzle about Further Facts∗ Vincent Conitzer Duke University Abstract In metaphysics, there are a number of distinct but related questions about the existence of “further facts”—facts that are contingent relative to the physical structure of the universe. These include further facts about qualia, personal identity, and time. In this article I provide a se- quence of examples involving computer simulations, ranging from one in which the protagonist can clearly conclude such further facts exist to one that describes our own condition. This raises the question of where along the sequence (if at all) the protagonist stops being able to soundly conclude that further facts exist. Keywords: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology. Case A. Fonda has just attended an inspiring department colloquium. On her way out, she absent- mindedly takes a wrong turn and wanders into a computer lab. She approaches one of the computers. ∗This paper appears in Erkenntnis (DOI: 10.1007/s10670-018-9979-6) and is also available as arXiv:1802.01161. 1 On it, a simulation of a number of humanoid agents in a virtual universe is being run. The perspective of one of these agents—call it Alpha—is continuously displayed on the monitor. Fonda is enthralled and continues to watch from Alpha’s perspective. Because Alpha takes a large variety of interesting actions in the simulated universe, it does not take Fonda long to learn the laws of physics governing it. Moreover, Fonda—whose undergraduate degree was in computer science—can easily imagine how one would write the code for simulating the environment according to these laws.
    [Show full text]
  • The Content of Consciousness: Do We Need Qualia?
    Kaleidoscope Volume 9 Article 23 November 2011 The onC tent of Consciousness: Do We Need Qualia? Sara Copic Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kaleidoscope Part of the Philosophy of Mind Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Copic, Sara (2010) "The onC tent of Consciousness: Do We Need Qualia?," Kaleidoscope: Vol. 9, Article 23. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kaleidoscope/vol9/iss1/23 This Summer Research and Creativity Grants is brought to you for free and open access by the The Office of Undergraduate Research at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Kaleidoscope by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Spotlight On Summer Research and Creativity Grants Sara Copic phenomena) must be accounted for without invoking other The Content of Consciousness: kinds of substances. Thus, while substance dualism (the idea that there are physical and mental substances which have Do We Need Qualia? different and mutually exclusive properties) is out, property Philosophy is the practice of coming dualism is still in the game. Hence, both an intentionalist and a to understand that with which we believe phenomenist could be property dualists, holding the view that we are most intimately familiar – our mental properties (thoughts, beliefs, phenomenal experience) social norms, the golden rule, learning, are fundamentally irreducible to their physical realizers (Heil our consciousness (to name just a few). Of course, there is 177). Since qualia preclude functional, cognitive, or intentional a sense in which we are all familiar with and understand characterization, they must, if they exist, supervene on these consciousness: we experience it in our normal waking life.
    [Show full text]
  • Hoffman's ''Proof'
    Consciousness and Cognition Consciousness and Cognition 15 (2006) 48–50 www.elsevier.com/locate/concog Commentary Hoffman’s ‘‘proof’’ of the possibility of spectrum inversion q Alex Byrne a, David Hilbert b,* a Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA b Department of Philosophy, Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience, University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 S. Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607-7114, USA Philosophers have devoted a great deal of discussion to the question of whether an inverted spectrum thought experiment refutes functionalism. (For a review of the inverted spectrum and its many philosophical applications, see Byrne, 2004.) If Hoffman is correct the matter can be swiftly and conclusively settled, without appeal to any empirical data about color vision (or anything else). Assuming only that color experiences and functional relations can be mathematically represented, a simple mathematical result—the Scrambling Theo- rem—shows that color experiences can be permuted while keeping functional relations constant, thus con- tradicting functionalism. It will be helpful to illustrate Hoffman’s argument with a very simple example. Suppose that there are two color experiences—experiences of red (state R) and experiences of green (state G), and that the functionalist identifies R with functional state FR, and G with functional state FG. A person can only be in one of these functional states at any particular time. According to the functionalist, then, it is impossible for R to obtain without FR, and vice versa. First, let us put the functionalist theory into the format of the Scrambling Theorem, using Hoffman’s nota- tion, and ‘R,’ ‘FR’, etc., to stand for mathematical surrogates for the experiences and functional states.
    [Show full text]
  • Wittgenstein Versus Zombies: an Investigation of Our Mental Concepts
    Chapter 22 Wittgenstein versus Zombies: An Investigation of Our Mental Concepts Edward Witherspoon 22.1 Introduction We human beings perceive our environment; we reflect on what we perceive; we have desires; we form intentions and act on them. All this mental activity is accompanied by what philosophers call ‘consciousness’, or the subjective experience of thinking. This is what it’s like to sense, reflect, desire, intend, and act. There is a distinctive inner feeling that goes with craving chocolate ice cream, and another that goes with seeing a purple armchair, and another that goes with wondering whether the weather will clear this afternoon. I can be sure that I have consciousness, and I naturally suppose that the people around me do too. But some philosophers have argued that it is possible for there to be a creature that looks, acts, and talks just like a human being, but that lacks consciousness. They have appropriated the term ‘zombie’ as the name for such a hypothetical being. There is something that it is like to be me—a way my experience feels—and there is something very different that it is like to be a bat, but there is nothing it is like to be a zombie. A zombie is all dark inside. To make this possibility vivid, imagine a twin who is a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of you. It is logically possible, according to these philosophers, that your twin could lack the consciousness that you possess. In similar fashion, we can imagine a ‘zombie world’, viz., a world that is like ours in every physical respect, where every particle of matter is just as it is in our world, but in which there is no consciousness.
    [Show full text]
  • Arxiv:1802.01161V1 [Physics.Hist-Ph] 4 Feb 2018 Aea
    A Puzzle about Further Facts∗ Vincent Conitzer Duke University Abstract In metaphysics, there are a number of distinct but related questions about the existence of “further facts”—facts that are contingent relative to the physical structure of the universe. These include further facts about qualia, personal identity, and time. In this article I provide a se- quence of examples involving computer simulations, ranging from one in which the protagonist can clearly conclude such further facts exist to one that describes our own condition. This raises the question of where along the sequence (if at all) the protagonist stops being able to soundly conclude that further facts exist. Keywords: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology. arXiv:1802.01161v1 [physics.hist-ph] 4 Feb 2018 Case A. Fonda has just attended an inspiring department colloquium. On her way out, she absent- mindedly takes a wrong turn and wanders into a computer lab. She approaches one of the computers. ∗This paper will appear in Erkenntnis. 1 On it, a simulationof a number of humanoidagentsin a virtual universe is being run. The perspective of one of these agents—call it Alpha—is continuously displayed on the monitor. Fonda is enthralled and continues to watch from Alpha’s perspective. Because Alpha takes a large variety of interesting actions in the simulated universe, it does not take Fonda long to learn the laws of physics governing it. Moreover, Fonda—whose undergraduate degree was in computer science—can easily imagine how one would write the code for simulating the environment according to these laws. Then, she has the following thought.
    [Show full text]
  • Wittgenstein and Qualia1 Introduction
    Wittgenstein and Qualia1 Ned Block NYU Abstract Wittgenstein (1968) endorsed one kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis and rejected another. This paper argues that the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis that Wittgenstein endorsed (the “innocuous” inverted spectrum hypothesis) is the thin end of the wedge that precludes a Wittgensteinian critique of the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis he rejected (the “dangerous” kind). The danger of the dangerous kind is that it provides an argument for qualia, where qualia are (for the purposes of this paper) contents of experiential states which cannot be fully captured in public language. I will pinpoint the difference between the innocuous and dangerous scenarios that matters for the argument for qualia, give arguments in favor of the coherence and possibility of the dangerous scenario, and try to show that some standard arguments against qualia are ineffective against the version of the dangerous scenario I will be advocating. One of the two arguments for qualia I will give is a “shifted spectrum” argument that is much less controversial than the version I gave in Block (1999), and the other argument for qualia is an “inverted spectrum” argument that is much less controversial than the one I gave in Block (1990). The inverted spectrum argument is much less controversial because it does not require a behaviorally indistinguishable spectrum inversion. Wittgenstein’s views provide a convenient starting point for a paper that is much more about qualia than about Wittgenstein. Introduction The content of an experiential state can often be described in public language partly in terms of qualities of objects that bear some salient relation to the state, for example, “looks red” or “feels like sandpaper” or “smells rotten”, but it is the contention of this paper that public language terms including terms for such properties of objects do not fully capture the contents.
    [Show full text]