Cover not available
Review article published In:
The Emergence of Consciousness: A top-down, social phenomenon?
Edited by Jonathan Cole and Marcelo Dascal †
[Pragmatics & Cognition 18:3] 2010
► pp. 597–606
Review article

Tye on materialism without phenomenal concepts

Comments on Consciousness Revisited

| Tel Aviv University
In this review article I examine Michel Tye’s recent reassessment of the phenomenal concept strategy. The phenomenal concept strategy is employed in the attempts to respond to the classical arguments that challenge materialism. I examine Tye’s reasons for abandoning the phenomenal concept strategy (a strategy that he himself advocated in his earlier writings), and I examine the elements of his new position according to which the materialist response should involve ‘singular when filled’ content schema, as well as a version of the Russellian distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. In the final part I criticize the adequacy of Tye’s theory not as a response to the dualists but rather as a response to opponents of representationalism from the materialist camp.
Keywords: consciousness, content schema, dualism, knowledge by acquaintance, materialism, perception, phenomenal concepts, the explanatory gap, the knowledge argument, the zombie argument, the modal argument
Published online: 12 April 2011
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.18.3.08sen
References (20)
References
Block, N. and Stalnaker, R. 1999. “Conceptual analysis, dualism, and the explanatory gap”. The Philosophical Review 108 (1): 1–46. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burge, T. 1979. “Individualism and the mental”. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41:73–122. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1986 1986. “Individualism and psychology”. Philosophical Review 451: 3–45. DOI logo DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chalmers, D. 1996. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1999. ”Materialism and the metaphysics of modality”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2): 473–496. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006. “The foundations of two dimensional semantics”. In M. G. Carpintero and J. Macià (eds), Two-Dimensional Semantics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 55–140.Google Scholar
Chalmers, D. and Jackson, F. 2001. “Conceptual analysis and reductive explanation”. The Philosophical Review 110 (3): 315–360. DOI logo DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Churchland, P. 1985. “Reduction, qualia, and the direct introspection of brain states”. The Journal of Philosophy 82 (1): 8–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Conee, E. 1994. “Phenomenal knowledge”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 721: 136–150. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crane, T. 2006. “Is there a perceptual relation?”. In T. S. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds), Perceptual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 126–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jackson, F. 1982. “Epiphenomenal qualia”. Philosophical Quarterly 32(127): 127–136. DOI logo DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1998. From Metaphysics to Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Kaplan, D. 1979. “Dthat”. In P. Cole (ed), Syntax and Semantics. NewYork: Academic Press, 221–243.Google Scholar
1989. “Demonstratives”. In J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein (eds), Themes from Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press, 481–563.Google Scholar
Kripke, S. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Levine, J. 1993. “On leaving out what it’s like”. In M. Davis and G. W. Humphreys (eds), Consciousness: Psychological and Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 121–136.Google Scholar
McGinn, C. 1982. The Character of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Russell, B. 1910. “Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description”. In his Mysticism and Logic. London: Unwin Books, 152–167.Google Scholar
Tye, M. 1995. Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000. Consciousness, Color and Content. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar