13 Mar
2006
13 Mar
'06
12:28 p.m.
This talk has been rescheduled for the second time, please note the
FINAL time below:
To avoid confusion I'll resend this announcement once more before the
time comes.
Hope to see you there!
Zoltán Jakab
*Katalin Balog*
Department of Philosophy, Yale University
The Quotational Account of Phenomenal Concepts
12 April, 2006 (Wednesday) 5 PM
CEU Department of Philosophy, 1051 Budapest, Zrínyi u. 14, 4th floor,
rm. 412.
The central /metaphysical/ question in the philosophy of mind is
whether mental phenomena- intentionality and phenomenal consciousness-
are ultimately /physical/biological /phenomena or whether they are or
involve fundamental aspects of reality that transcend the physical and
biological. Most contemporary philosophers and neuro-scientists reject
dualism because - among other difficulties - it cannot account for how
consciousness causally interacts with physical events including
behavior. The central /explanatory /issue is whether mental phenomena -
even if they are physical - can be explained in terms of more basic
physical/biological phenomena. While there has been some progress with
respect to understanding intentional and rational features of mentality
in biological/physical terms we still have no idea of how the subjective
experience - /the what its like -/ of seeing a sunset can emerge from a
brain process. The situation with respect to subjective experience
contrasts, for example, with the way we can understand (although many
details are lacking) how the complex organization of molecules can
constitute cells and how cells can constitute living organisms, and in
general, how chemical processes can give rise to biological phenomena.
There seems to be something about consciousness that /resists/
scientific explanation. Lacking a physicalist account of consciousness,
a defense of physicalism needs to explain the existence of this
explanatory gap in a way that is compatible with the truth of physicalism.
<> On my account, our lack of understanding the psychophysical
connection, the /explanatory gap/, is not due to consciousness being
non-physical but rather to the special nature of the /concepts /via
which we represent our subjective experiences to ourselves. My view is
that these concepts are partly /constituted/ by the experiences they
represent. This view has recently become popular among physicalists who
accept the existence of the explanatory gap. However, proponents of the
constitutional theory of phenomenal concepts have to offer and account
of how the reference of phenomenal concepts are determined. After all,
constitution doesn't make for reference in most cases. The concept DOG
is not constituted by dogs, and the fact that the concept ATOM /is/
constituted by atoms has nothing to do with why it refers to atoms. It
seems to me plausible that one must look to the /conceptual role /of
phenomenal concepts for an explanation of their self-referential nature.
The idea of an item partly constituting a representation that refers
to that item is reminiscent of how linguistic quotation works.
The referent of "__" is exemplified by whatever fills in the blank. My proposal
is that there is a concept forming mechanism that operates on
an experience and turns it into a phenomenal concept that refers to a type of experience
where the type is qualitative property (a qualia) of
the experience. Further, the operation, like linguistic quotation, can be explained in
terms of its conceptual roles.
* *
*BMS home page:* http://philosophy.elte.hu/bms
*Inquiries:* zjakab(a)cogsci.bme.hu <mailto:zjakab@cogsci.bme.hu>