The Phenomenal Concept Strategy

Abstract

A powerful reply to a range of familiar anti-physicalist arguments has recently been developed. According to this reply, our possession of phenomenal concepts can explain the facts that the anti-physicalist claims can only be explained by a non-reductive account of phenomenal consciousness. Chalmers (2006) argues that the phenomenal concept strategy is doomed to fail. This paper presents the phenomenal concept strategy, Chalmers ’ argument against it, and a defense of the strategy against his argument. 1. Introduction. Being in pain feels a certain way. Looking at a red rose, smelling it, feeling the thorns on its stem: these experiences all feel a certain way as well. We will call these feels “phenomenal feels ” and we will say that anyone who has such phenomenal feels is phenomenally conscious. Philosophers have presented and defended a range of arguments and thought-experiments

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.