INVESTIGADORES
PEREZ Diana Ines
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Phenomenal concepts, nonconceptual experience and Mary´s puzzle
Autor/es:
PÉREZ, DIANA INÉS
Lugar:
Chicago
Reunión:
Congreso; Congreso de la American Philosophical Association- Central Division; 2008
Institución organizadora:
American Philosophical Association
Resumen:
One of the more widespread physicalist’s answers to this argument is the phenomenal concept strategy (hereafter, PC strategy) or "perspectival strategy" developed, among others, by Loar 1990, Lycan 2002. According to the PC strategy, there are special kinds of concepts – pure phenomenal concepts – which cannot be possessed before having the experiences referred to by them. If experiences are physical states, as the physicalist claims, then these are concepts that refer to physical properties from a different "mode of presentation". Given that Mary cannot possess them before being released from her black-andwhite room (because of the very nature of these special kinds of concepts) and that they refer to physical properties, Jackson´s intuition holds without abandoning physicalism. Mary learns something because she acquires new concepts and she can thus entertain new propositions in her mind. However, this new epistemic situation does not have any ontological consequences. In this paper I will discuss this type of response to Mary´s puzzle. 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. 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. In this paper I will develop my own account of phenomenal concepts, but previously, in the first part, I will explore some problems in characterizing phenomenal concepts