Physicalism, phenomenal concepts and Mary´s puzzle

PÉREZ, DIANA

Joao Pessoa, Brasil

Congreso; V Encontro internacional de filosofia da mente; 2009

Universidad de Paraíba

In this paper I will discuss this type of response to Mary´s puzzle posed by Jackson 1982. I will defend the idea that there is a grain of truth behind the claim that we need phenomenal concepts to answer Mary´s puzzle. But phenomenal concepts are difficult to characterize; there are many different ways of understanding them. The plan of the paper is the following. In the first part I will explain the requirements phenomenal concepts should satisfy in order to solve Mary´s puzzle. In the second part I will present different accounts of what a phenomenal concept is, and I will show the difficulties each of them have. Finally, I will develop my own account of phenomenal concepts, My thesis claims that phenomenal concepts are not a pure label of our phenomenal experiences, as many defenders of these notions are led to hold. Rather, they are complex concepts whose possession conditions depend upon the mastery of many other concepts, in fact, quite complex concepts such as the distinction between appearance and reality (which belongs to our theory of mind system), and color concepts (at least in the case of the phenomenal concepts needed in order to account for Mary´s case). But these later concepts are also recognitional concepts, that is, concepts that have special possession conditions: they include the deployment of nonconceptual recognitional capacities