Physicalism, qualia and mental concepts

PEREZ, DIANA INÉS

THEORIA

Universidad del Pais Vasco

Lugar: Donostia; Año: 2002 vol. 44 p. 359 - 379

0495-4548

In his recent book Mind in a Physical World, Jaegwon Kim develops and defends the view that a robust physicalism must commit itself to a reductive account of mental phenomena. To achieve a functional reduction of a given phenomenon, Kim´s recipe is that ?we must stop thinking of it as an intrinsic property but construe it as an extrinsic property characterized relationally, in terms of causal/nomic relations.? (Kim 1998, p. 25). But there is a rock in the road of this physicalist project: the so-called ?qualia, ? the qualitative, subjective, conscious features of our mental life that seem to resist functionalization and, for that reason, reduction. As a consequence, the most obvious, directly known features of the world, our own sensations, ruin the entire enterprise of physicalism. If this line of argument is sound, then the remaining options in the mind-body problem are the following two: (a) to adopt physicalism, i.e. mind-body supervenience plus some other ?deep? relation grounding it, in which case the cost is the unreality of some mental properties or (b) to adopt dualism and reject mind-body supervenience. (Kim 1998, pp. 118-20) Neither of these two options seems attractive to me, so I shall carefully examine the arguments that drove Kim to these desperate options. His arguments, in my view, presuppose a strong version of physicalism, that I consider inappropriate. In this paper I shall try to show that, if we reformulate the thesis of physicalism according to Kim? s own previous view about physicalism (in terms of the supervenience relation with a nomological necessity involved), there are more interesting additional options to consider. I shall try to sketch a third option -a kind of type physicalism- where physicalism and qualia could be conciliated. In order to do that, I shall examine three arguments: the explanatory gap argument, the inverted spectrum argument, and the intrinsicality argument. My aim is to show that these arguments involve a notion of ?phenomenal concept? that does not correspond to any ordinary mental concept we possess. If we build a theory of mind taking as a starting point our ordinary mental concepts, type physicalism is still a viable option.