Plate - Physicalism and Subjectivity

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Physicalism and Subjectivity

Jan Plate

17th February 2007



Contents

1 Physicalism 2

1.1 Introduction and Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21.2 Possible Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41.3 Physicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

1.3.1 Defining ‘Physicalism’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61.3.2 A Priori vs A Posteriori . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

1.4 The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

2 Subjectivity: Preliminaries 22

2.1 The Concept of Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232.2 Ob jections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

2.2.1 Inspired by Wittgenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272.2.2 Inspired by Sellars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272.2.3 Inspired by Dennett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

2.3 The Concepts of ‘I’ and Accessibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342.4 Why Accessibility? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362.5 Contexts of Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

3 Subjectivity 41

3.1 The Epistemological Concept of Subjectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

3.1.1 Defining ‘Subjectivity’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423.1.2 Intuitions, and the Concept of Consciousness . . . . . . . . 433.1.3 Metaphysical Significance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483.1.4 Remaining Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

3.2 The Knowledge Intuition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513.3 Possession Conditions of the Concept of Data . . . . . . . . . . . . 533.4 Vicarious Cognition and the Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment . . 553.5 The Concepts of Adjunction and Φ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

4 Subjectivity and Physicalism 65

4.1 Gradedness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 674.2 Liberal Reductionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 704.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

4.3.1 Possible Objections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 764.3.2 Phenomenal Judgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 784.3.3 Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

1



Chapter 1

Physicalism

1.1 Introduction and Overview

Not many philosophical positions have so often been made the subject of attackas the materialist stance on the nature of the mind. One of the likely reasons

for this is that it marks one of the horns of a dilemma: on the one hand, it isnot easy see how the mind could possibly be the product of the workings of merematter, however intricately composed. And on the other hand, we have no ideahow anything else but matter could act on the matter of our bodies or itself beaffected by it (e.g., through the senses). This dilemma, of course, is the famousmind-body problem. Its first horn would be to deny the proposition that the mindshould be the product of ‘material’ processes; often, the alternative suggestionhas then been a kind of mind-body dualism. To be sure, this position has beenattacked repeatedly and severely. But the basis of those attacks has practicallyalways been the same: dualism is an ontologically rather extravagant claim, and itis completely unclear how mind and body should interact or otherwise be broughtinto alignment with each other. It is just because of this criticism, of course,that the dilemma also has a second horn, namely the materialist view, which isendorsed for exactly those reasons dualism is rejected for. And quite analogously(as well as unsurprisingly), the main source of support for dualism has at the sametime been the preferred basis for attacks on materialism.

In contrast to the case of dualism, however, this basis – the difficulty of under-standing how the mind could be the product of material processes – offers muchmore potential for variation, and the attacks launched from it have been corre-spondingly more numerous. That potential for variation stems from the various‘features’ of the mind – e.g., intentionality, rationality, qualia, and (in whateversense) subjectivity – that might be thought to be unrealisable by a purely physicalprocess. Rationality and qualia, in particular, have in the last century proved afertile ground for the proposal of ever new (though certainly closely related) argu-ments against materialism, and in addition, there are even empirical findings that

have been interpreted in favour of a non-materialist view of the mind.1

Despitethe large number of these arguments, however, and the vigour with which theyhave been defended, it is today safe to say that the case against the materialistview of the mind is far from won. And it seems that the main reason for this is notthe stubbornness of the materialists, but rather the deeply unconvincing nature of the anti-materialist arguments. I will have to leave this claim unsupported here,

1Eccles and Popper (1977); Penfield (1975). ‘Empirical’ should here be understood in thesense of ‘based on third-person observations’.

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CHAPTER 1. PHYSICALISM 3

but some flaws of those arguments will already become evident in the course of the present chapter.

The dissatisfaction with those anti-physicalist arguments, coupled with thebelief that their common conclusion is nevertheless correct, provides the mainmotivation for this thesis. Its goal is therefore the detailed development of adefensible argument against the materialist view of the mind. This argument

will not be entirely novel. An important part of it occurs already in the thirdchapter of David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind (the relevant passages are citedbelow, on p. 67), where, however, it takes up little more than a single paragraph.A reasonably detailed development of this argument requires considerably morespace and a lot more preparation – much more than I had originally thoughtmyself. The argument itself will be presented in the final chapter, the first sectionof which is dedicated to Chalmers’ part. The two middle chapters mainly serve aspreparation.

As the title of this thesis suggests, the central concept of that argument is thatof subjectivity . In my exposition of Chalmers’ part of the argument, I will arguethat subjectivity is ‘not graded’, i.e., that it cannot be a matter of degree whether agiven entity is a subject, and that this makes it difficult for the materialist (who willthen be called ‘physicalist’) to provide an adequate analysis of that property. The

‘standard’ analyses invariably fail because they analyse subjectivity as a gradedproperty. Hence, what is needed is a non-graded ‘materialistic’ property withwhich to identify subjectivity. As I will argue at the beginning of the secondpart of the argument, this would almost certainly have to be a very wide-spreadproperty; in particular, what suggests itself would be the property of ‘being aphysical system’. And this escape route for the materialist will then be closed,thereby completing the reductio of the materialist (or ‘physicalist’) position. Or soit would be in a perfect world. It will emerge, however, that the identification of subjectivity with the property of being a physical system cannot be conclusivelyshown to be false, but only to be in a certain sense unsatisfactory. Correspondingly,the reductio will not be complete, and the conclusion of the argument will notbe that the materialist position is false, but only that it is in the same senseunsatisfactory. Still, I am convinced that this argument constitutes – short of moreconclusive empirical evidence – the currently most defensible way of attacking thematerialist view of the mind.

In preparation to the actual argument, the concept of subjectivity is developedin the two middle chapters, the first of which serves mainly to lay the ground forthe second one. To show that subjectivity is indeed a graded property requiresa somewhat formal definition of the term, but it is also necessary to connect thisdefinition with our common intuitions of what it means to be be a ‘subject’. Allthis will be done in the first section of chapter 3. The definition of subjectivityrelies itself on another concept, that of accessibility , which in turn is based on thatof data . Both of these will be introduced in chapter 2, along with a few others.

Rather than to introduce new concepts, the task of the present chapter isto provide clearer definitions of existing ones, and in particular of the concept

of physicalism . If I have so far instead been talking of the “materialist viewof the mind”, this was because ‘materialism’, and not ‘physicalism’, is the termhistorically most associated with the mind-body problem, which, as mentioned,provides the general background of this thesis. However, coined in the first half of the last century by members of the Vienna Circle, ‘physicalism’ has relativelysoon become the more frequently used term in the context of the philosophy of mind.2 Since it would, at least from an etymological point of view, make little

2Although there are certain niches where the term ‘materialism’ is dominant. Eliminativism,




sense to draw a semantic distinction between the two, it will mainly be out of compliance with the generally accepted usage that I am in the following going tospeak of ‘physicalism’ instead of ‘materialism’. There is one other reason, however:because ‘physicalism’ is considerably more dominant in the philosophy of mindthan in other fields, and is moreover less soaked in tradition than ‘materialism’,it seems to be much more suitable a term for a (re)definition that associates it

with a concept intrinsically tied to the philosophy of mind. I will propose such adefinition in sect. 1.3.1 below.

Two of the sections not mentioned so far (namely, 1.4 and 3.1.4) will primarilydeal with the problem of how an anti-physicalist position (a ‘non-materialist viewof the mind’) can at all be plausibly maintained. These are more lengthy andof a somewhat more technical nature than most of the other sections and can beskipped on first reading. I should point out, however, that the second part of the main argument, presented in the final chapter, draws heavily on the conceptof adjunction , defined in sect. 3.1.4, which in turn ideally presupposes an under-standing of sect. 1.4. For the purpose of orientation, it may also be useful to havea look at the diagram on p. 76.

I am going to start now by briefly sketching a categorisation scheme for thevarious directions that a solution of the mind-body problem might take. The

intent is to add a little bit of structure to the general backdrop of our discussion.

1.2 Possible Directions for a Solution of the Mind-

Body Problem

A natural way to classify approaches to the mind-body problem relies on differ-ences in the degree of theoretical conservatism. It is in such a difference that thetraditional divide between materialism and dualism essentially consists. Since at-tempts to solve the mind-body problem are necessarily positions on the questionof how to integrate the ‘phenomenon’ of the mind in one’s general picture of theworld, we can move from the mind to phenomena in general and ask what theprincipal ways are in which a theorist might choose to treat a new phenomenon.

The naturally first classificatory step concerns the question of whether thetheorist believes that the phenomenon requires a revision of his current theory.If he thinks it does not , this means that, if he is not mistaken, the phenomenoncan either be accommodated on the basis of his existing theory, or that it doesnot really exist in the first place (e.g. because it can easily be ‘explained away’).According to whether he believes the one or the other, we can call him either areductionist or a sceptic.3 On the other side, if he believes that a theory changeis called for, the theorist seems to have three principal options, according to thedegree that he takes the phenomenon to be explainable on the basis of his currenttheory. On the first approach, the change consists mainly in a reinterpretation of some or all of the old theoretical terms, such that they account (as it is hoped)not only for the already explained phenomena but also for the new one. The

second approach simply adds new fundamental predicates to the old ontology,but does so in a rather conservative way, preserving the general structure of the

e.g., is also called ‘eliminative materialism’ but not ‘eliminative physicalism’.3The term ‘reductionism’ is here admittedly not a very happy choice, as it is already fraught

with all kinds of different meanings and connotations. There does, however, not seem to be abetter alternative.

For details concerning what it means to accommodate a phenomenon “on the basis of existingtheory”, see the discussion of physicalism in the next section.




world and just allowing the things in it to have a number of properties in additionto those they already had before. Finally, the third strategy posits an entirelynew kind of things alongside the old ontology. Finding names for these differentapproaches is relatively straightforward. The first one of these strategies mayappropriately be named ‘revisionism’, the second one ‘property dualism’ and thethird one ‘substance dualism’. The last two of these ‘isms’ are already sufficiently

familiar; I might perhaps add that emergentism should in general be regarded asa kind of property dualism. Good examples of revisionism motivated by the needto ‘save’ mental phenomena are hard to come by, however. To my knowledge,nothing in this direction has so far been proposed.

The picture this leaves us with is certainly somewhat simplistic, but I thinkit does provide a reasonable way to classify the various approaches that might betaken in order to come to grips with the mind (or any other phenomenon). Tosummarise, we have:

(1) Scepticism,

(2) Reductionism,

(3) Revisionism,

(4) Property dualism, and

(5) Substance dualism.

The general order in which the strategies are listed here seems to reflect theorder in which they should be tried in order to cope with a purported new phe-nomenon. Let me briefly explain why I think so. Arguably, when a phenomenon isreported but its existence not yet firmly established, it will be best to deny its exis-tence, leading to scepticism ; obviously, only when it is known that the phenomenonreally does exist should one try to give it an explanation at all. At first, one shouldattempt an explanation in terms of the already existing theory, believing in thepossibility of which makes one a reductionist . If such an explanation turns out notto be available, one should next try to give the terms of one’s theory a slightly

different interpretation, in an attempt to eliminate the restrictions that preventit from explaining the phenomenon. Only if such revisionism proves impossible(for example, because it would seriously threaten the explanatory achievements re-garding other phenomena), should one consider property dualism . It is clear thatthe cost of such a move is relatively high, since it involves increasing the number of one’s fundamental predicates and thus increasing the complexity of one’s theory.4

Yet property dualism is still less costly than substance dualism , for the followingreason. In order to construct a property-dualist ontology, all that is needed to dois to introduce a set of new fundamental predicates and to specify certain lawsgoverning their application. This, of course, also needs to be done if one choosesto be a substance dualist; but whereas in the former case, one is quite free in howthose laws are fashioned, as a substance dualist, one will at least have to specifythat some of the old fundamental predicates do not find application where some

of the new ones do. This, after all, is what enables a substance dualist to speakof ‘two realms’.5

We see, then, that property dualism should be preferred to substance dualismbecause the latter is more specific than the former, namely insofar as substance

4I am presupposing here, perhaps not quite uncontroversially, that ontological parsimonyshould be measured in terms of theoretical complexity, as opposed to, e.g., the number of entitiesadmitted or necessitated by the ontology in question.

5Cf. the way that Millikan (1984, p. 254) defines her concept of ‘substance category’.




dualism should not be adopted as long as there is no good reason to believe in aseparation between the ‘two realms’. But there is also a deeper reason. For, itmay be that that separation prevents the substance dualist from exploiting theexplanatory potential of having both old and new predicates be applicable to thesame entities. To give an – admittedly crude – example: Suppose it is believed (asmay seem reasonable) that only relatively large chunks of matter can have con-

sciousness, and that, having for some reason found strategies (1) to (3) insufficient,one has come to take a property-dualist view on this topic. What one might do istherefore to ‘analyse’ consciousness as an aggregate of some large number of tiny‘mental particles’. Being a property (but not a substance) dualist, one may furtherpostulate that these ‘mental particles’ are nothing else than the familiar physical particles, only equipped with additional ‘mental’ properties (‘proto-qualia’, per-haps). Now, according to our ‘analysis’ of consciousness, these particles need onlybe put together into a sufficiently large aggregate, and voila! – consciousness.

Crude though this example certainly is, I think it still serves to illustrate thepoint, namely that there may be a kind of ‘synergy’ between old and new predi-cates which a theorist can and should seek to exploit, and that this synergy wouldbe lost in substance dualism. The result is that possibly, the substance dualist willhave to painstakingly create the same structures in his new ‘realm’ that he could

have found in the old one if only he had looked hard enough. And for this reason, itseems we should first try a strictly property-dualistic ontology before, as a last re-sort, we turn to substance dualism. Having said this, I should emphasise, however,that the ordering of the strategies does not mean that every kind of revisionism ispreferable to every property dualism, nor that every property dualism should befavoured over every kind of substance dualism. Of course, each of these strategiesallows for the construction of excessively complex ontologies, and it might well bethat a revisionist ontology is, when spelt out, far more complicated than a simpleform of substance dualism. And also, of course, it may turn out that an approachfurther to the top of the list simply does not ‘fit the data’.

1.3 Physicalism

To borrow a phrase from Georges Rey, physicalism is the metaphysical doctrinethat everything in the world is composed of “matter in motion”.6 This formulationis admittedly somewhat imprecise (it leaves out non-kinetic forms of energy), but,at least prima facie, it serves well enough to convey the basic idea. On closerexamination, however, it turns out that a precise definition of physicalism is farmore difficult to provide than it at first seems.

1.3.1 Defining ‘Physicalism’

In the course of the dialectic between physicalists and anti-physicalists, there havein recent decades been a number of proposals on how physicalism should be speltout exactly. The recently most influential one has been given by Frank Jackson

and runs as follows:

“Any world which is a minimal physical duplicate of our world is a duplicatesimpliciter of our world.”7

6Rey (1997, p. 180).7Jackson (1994, p. 28). – The following remarks on the existing literature draw heavily, though

not without reservations, on Daniel Stoljar’s article Physicalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stoljar (2001). The reservations concern in part Stoljar’s discussion of the possible




The idea of this is simply that physicalism is true just in case every world in whichexactly the same physical facts hold as in our world, and where nothing holdsthat is not necessitated by this (hence “minimal”), is a duplicate simpliciter of our world. A more concise way of putting this would be: Physicalism is true iff our world is a minimal physical duplicate of itself.8 Or, closer to ordinary waysof speaking: Physicalism claims that all the fundamental facts of our world are

physical facts.Now, while this definition of ‘physicalism’ may look reasonable enough, it is

clear that in order to make any use of it, we should first like to know what exactly ismeant by ‘physical’. As has been pointed out by Crane and Mellor (1990, p. 188),there is a certain threat here of triviality. For, if ‘physical’ is to mean, roughly,‘consisting of nothing but what has been discovered or hypothesised by current-dayphysics’, then physicalism would entail that the world does not contain anythingfundamental whose existence has not already been proposed by at least sometheory of physics. This is surely a much too optimistic view of current physics forany philosopher to embrace. But if the current state of theorizing cannot be themeasure, the only possible option is to rely on an idealised notion of physics. Andclearly, this would mean trivialisation, since an ideal physics would be a sciencethat covers each and every fundamental aspect of our universe; a science that tells

us exactly what it means for a world to be “a duplicate” of our world. Thusconceived, there would indeed be no question whether physicalism has to be true.9

In response to this problem, the philosophical literature offers two kinds of approaches, which Stoljar (op. cit.) labels “the theory-based conception” and“the object-based conception”, respectively, and which he describes as follows:

• The theory-based conception: “A property is physical iff: it either is the sortof property that physical theory tells us about or else is a property whichmetaphysically (or logically) supervenes on the sort of property that physicaltheory tells us about.”

• The object-based conception: “A property is physical iff: it either is the sortof property required by a complete account of the intrinsic nature of paradig-

matic physical objects and their constituents or else is a property whichmetaphysically (or logically) supervenes on the sort of property required bya complete account of the intrinsic nature of paradigmatic physical objectsand their constituents.”10

Of these, the second conception offers at first sight an interesting alternativeto the arguably more mainstream theory-based conception. However, I think it isalmost immediately clear that it suffers from a rather fatal flaw: Suppose panpsy-chism is true and those “paradigmatic physical objects”, like apples, chairs and

objections to the various formulations of physicalism, which seems to me marred by certainquestionable views on the proper treatment of modality. Also, it seems that his argument againstthe “derivation-view” (sect. 7) is logically flawed.

8I believe this is the formulation preferred by Brian McLaughlin.9Stoljar and others ascribe this dilemma to Hempel (1969), thus calling it “Hempel’s dilemma”

(cf. sect. 10). Yet this ascription strikes me as somewhat inappropriate. Hempel’s “linguistic-ontological dilemma” (op. cit., p. 182f.) is a dilemma between two slightly different kinds of obscurity (namely, the obscurity of what is to count as a physical, biological, chemical etc. objector system vs the obscurity of what is to count as a physical, biological, chemical etc. term ),whereas what Stoljar (as well as Crane and Mellor) talks about is a dilemma between falsity and

triviality . More could be said here, but this seems to be the main disanalogy.10For an example of the theory-based conception, see Chalmers (1996, p. 32f.); Feigl’s concept

of ‘physical2’ can plausibly be regarded as object-based (Feigl 1967, p. 10). Jackson (1998, p. 7f.)seems to endorse a kind of mixture of these two kinds of conceptions.




pencils are also bearers of mental properties. Surely, such a case should be ruledout by any kind of physicalism worthy of that name. Since there seems to beno easy way in which the object-based conception could be modified to meet thisobjection, the apparently only option is a theory-based conception of the physical.Unfortunately, this conception is not quite without problems either. For not muchis gained with regard to an explication of the physical if we are simply told to look

to “physical theories”; after all, what makes a theory physical?Stoljar’s solution to this problem is to point to a Wittgensteinian “family re-

semblance” between the physical theories found in history, such as Newtonianmechanics, Maxwellian thermodynamics, General Relativity, and so forth. NowI think this is the only possible, or at least the most reasonable, route to take –provided we want to regard physicalism as a general metaphysical claim. But onthe other hand: are we really interested in physicalism as a general metaphysi-cal doctrine – especially if it takes on such a vague form as we have just arrivedat? How much are we interested in a physicalism that merely holds that a the-ory which correctly describes the fundamental facts of our world bears a “familyresemblance” to the known physical theories? (And besides, how much are wewilling to stretch this “family resemblance”? It is after all a commonplace obser-vation that modern physical theories are often very strange indeed, even by the

physicists’ own standards.)The more important point, however, concerns the fact that a physicalism con-

ceived in terms of “family resemblance” is, because of this vagueness, not at alleasy to pin down for the purpose of philosophical argument. We need certainlynot suppose that our conception of physicalism would be rendered entirely uselessby such vagueness; but it nevertheless seems that its use will thereby be restrictedto a role similar to the one that the term ‘traditional’ plays e.g. in the physicalsciences. That is, one may use it in order to give a broad classification of somegiven theory, and that will be fine if nothing more is desired. But if one would liketo use it in a relevant way in the course of philosophical argument, it will quicklybecome apparent that sentences containing the term ‘physicalism’ or ‘physicalist’will typically appear at the end, and not in the middle or at the beginning, of anysuch argument. This is simply due to the fact that propositions containing vagueterms tend to be logically rather weak (regardless of whether negated or not), sothat in general, not very much can be derived from them when compared to moreprecise formulations.

Much more than this would have to be said concerning potential problemsand necessary qualifications, if Jackson’s proposal were in the following to serveas our definition of ‘physicalism’. However, for the reasons just given, I wouldrather like to make use of another conception of ‘physicalism’, one that does notsuffer as much from the imprecision surrounding the term ‘physical’. The priceof the added precision will be diminished generality: the notion will no longerbe a general metaphysical claim, but rather something specifically belonging tothe metaphysics of the mind. On the other hand, insofar as the metaphysics of the mind is exactly what we are here concerned with, this loss of generality can

be easily tolerated in the present context. I will therefore propose the followingdefinition:

(P) Physicalism is the position that our current physics provides a sufficient basisfor the accommodation of all mental phenomena.

For a clearer picture of what this means, we have to clarify (1) the meaningof “current physics”, (2) what it means to say that it is a “sufficient basis for theaccommodation” of a “phenomenon”, and (3) what is meant by the term ‘mental




phenomenon’. To start with the last item, I think it would not be very fruitfulto give a crisp definition of ‘mental phenomenon’ at this point. Such a definitionmay or may not be given after a fuller view of the fundamentals of mentality hasbecome available, but before we have reached that state, we should be contentwith an intuitive understanding. More than that will not be needed to guide ourinvestigation. I should also note in this connection that the term ‘phenomenon’

may already be somewhat misleading. For the goal of our argument will be to showthat current physics is unable to provide a satisfactory account of subjectivity ,and in the course of the following chapters, it will emerge that subjectivity isstrictly speaking not a phenomenon at all. Nevertheless, it is inextricably boundup with our notion of ‘the mental’, and it will therefore be equally significant forthe philosophy of mind if current physics is unable to give a satisfactory accountof subjectivity as it would if current physics could not accommodate any bona

fide mental phenomenon. Thus, I will not only base the following investigationon a purely intuitive understanding of what it means to be mental phenomenon,but also (at least insofar as the present definition of ‘physicalism’ is concerned)presuppose a very broad interpretation of the term ‘phenomenon’ itself.

As for (1) and (2), there is on the one hand the problem that current physicsis not just a single theory, but a whole collection of many mutually incompatible

theories, and on the other hand the problem of specifying what it means for atheory to accommodate a “phenomenon”. We can solve these problems in tan-dem. First of all, I would propose that we adopt an ‘ontological’ view on the issueof accommodation, to the effect that we treat theories as ontologies and regarda phenomenon as ‘accommodated’ by a theory just in case it exists in the corre-sponding ontology. How do we get from a theory to the corresponding ontology?This is a question I would leave to the respective theory’s author himself. Afterall, every theorist who has a clear idea of what he is proposing should be able tospecify what kinds of things have to exist if his theory is to be true. I supposethat the canonical way to do this will be by an enumeration of axioms throughwhich the fundamental predicates of the respective ontology are defined; in par-ticular, it will have to be made clear in what ways entities can be individuatedby these predicates. And in order for the ontology to have a reasonably determi-nate interpretation in natural language, it should be specified how its fundamentalpredicates are related to certain fundamental natural-language concepts, such as,e.g., the concepts of space and time. On the basis of such an ontology O, annotatedwith hints as to how its fundamental predicates should be translated into naturallanguage, it should be relatively determinate which phenomena exist according toit and which do not. Or, to move away from the term ‘phenomenon’ (which wehave found to be somewhat too specific in the previous paragraph): it should berelatively determinate which predicates of natural language are instantiated in O.I say ‘relatively determinate’ because it may in some cases be necessary to decide‘by hand’, and with a certain degree of arbitrariness, whether a given predicatedefined in the vocabulary of O should be regarded as subsumed under a givennatural-language predicate. So, further ‘annotations’ may be required, in addition

to those concerning the fundamental predicates.Now, considering the nature of actual physical theories, we see that their claimsand definitions do usually not suffice to determine a complete ontology. For onething, no theory that I am aware of fully specifies the initial conditions of theuniverse, even though these conditions clearly have some causal influence on whatpredicates will be instantiated in later stages of universal history. An exceptionare theories according to which all initial conditions compatible with the respec-tive laws are realised in separate universes; but it would surely be wrong to leave




the more conventional ‘monocosmic’ theories out of account, insofar as our under-standing of ‘current physics’ is concerned. Furthermore, it is a well-known factthat many physicists believe in irreducibly probabilistic (or “intractably statis-tical”) laws. According to this belief, some events can happen ‘spontaneously’,completely undetermined (though, of course, not unconstrained) by circumstancesor natural law. Clearly, these events, too, have an influence on what kinds of things

exist in the universe. There is, here again, the exception of ‘polycosmic’ theoriespositing a multiplicity of universes, where for each set of mutually exclusive pos-sible events (i.e., events that are compatible with the rest of the theory, possiblyincluding the ‘event’ that nothing happens), the respective universe ‘splits up’ intoas many further universes. These theories, however, have considerable difficultyaccounting for the fact that such events are usually not equally probable,11 and inany case, they can hardly be taken to represent ‘current physics’ to the exclusionof all other theories. We see then that to turn a monocosmic physical theory intoa full ontology, we have to supplement it with a specification of the initial state of the universe, and that, if the theory moreover contains ‘irreducibly probabilisticlaws’, we also have to specify exactly what ‘spontaneous’ events have occurred orwill occur in the history of the universe. (Of course, in the completed ontology,these latter specifications will have no different status from the more commonly

so called natural laws, which certainly runs somewhat counter to the physicist’stalk of spontaneous events; but so much the worse for that talk.)

Now, does the fact that many physical theories leave some of their ontologicalissues unsettled constitute a problem for our definition of ‘physicalism’ ? Appar-ently, not really – or at least, it does not add a further problem to the difficultyalready resulting from the multiplicity of physical theories themselves. For thesolution in either case is to turn to disjunction . If current physics consists of many mutually incompatible theories, we can regard it as a disjunction of thesetheories. And likewise, if a physicist’s theory is ontologically underspecified, hemay construe the ontology corresponding to his theory as a disjunction of the var-ious ontologies with which his theory is compatible. Thus, the ontology of current physics emerges as a very long and possibly infinite disjunction of many differentontologies (see figure 1.1). As for the question of what it means for a phenomenonto be accommodated by current physics, the natural answer will be that it is ac-commodated just in case it occurs in at least one of the ontologies of which thedisjunction is made up. To add a little bit of terminology: if a predicate (e.g., of natural language) can plausibly be translated into the vocabulary of a given the-ory, I will say that the theory provides that predicate; moreover, if the predicateis provided by a theory of current physics, I will say that the predicate is provided by current physics. And last but not least, I will call an entity physical just in caseit can be fully described by predicates of current physics.12

Still, it may have to be clarified what theories are to count as ‘theories of current physics’. If every theory developed somewhere by some physicist were tocount as a ‘theory of current physics’, we would clearly not be in a position tosay anything about what the phenomena are that are left unexplained by current

physics, since we would be completely unaware of most of those theories. So, if onlyfor practical reasons, we have to restrict the class of ‘theories of current physics’

11Cf. Chalmers (1996, ch. 10.5).12This is of course not to say that a physical entity could not instantiate any predicates that

are not provided by current physics. A better (though less familiar-sounding) way of explainingthe meaning of ‘physical’ would be to say that an entity is called ‘physical’ just in case it is fullyindividuated by such a predicate. This means: if and only if an entity x is physical, there is a(usually complex) predicate provided by current physics that is true of no other entity but x.




O1,1 ∨O1,2 ∨ . . .

T 1

∨O2,1 ∨O2,2 ∨ . . .

T 2

∨O3,1 ∨O3,2 ∨ . . .

T 3

∨ . . .

. . .

T i (for i = 1, . . .): theories of current physics.

Figure 1.1: The disjunctive ontology of current physics.

to those that have been reasonably widely acknowledged, such as string theoryor ‘branes’ theory, for example. This restriction is admittedly rather vague. Onecould make it more precise, e.g., by explicitly requiring the theories in question tobe published in certain well-respected journals, but at present, there seems to menot much point in doing so.

Let us now briefly consider the most important consequences of the abovedefinition of ‘physicalism’. First of all, as previously mentioned, physicalism isunder that definition a claim for what is required by a proper treatment of mentalphenomena, as opposed to being a claim simply about the nature of the universe.This clearly marks it as a position within philosophy of mind.

Second, the proposed concept of physicalism is relative to the current state of physics. I do not think this poses any serious problems. After all, it only meansthat whoever uses the definition should be reasonably clear about the point of time that determines what he regards as “the current state of physics”. For ourpurposes, we can fix this to be the beginning of the year 2005. To appreciate therelevance of this, consider that some have claimed that classical physics does nothave the means naturally to accommodate mental phenomena, whereas quantummechanics does.13 Similarly, if there should be some physical breakthrough some-time this year allowing us to explain all the mental phenomena there are, thiswould mean that Physicalism 2006 would be correct whereas Physicalism 2005might be simply wrong.

Third, physicalism does, according to the above definition, not imply that our

current physics is complete. It may well be that our current physical theorieswill turn out to be changed, extended,supplemented or replaced by somethingentirely different, and this will all be quite compatible with physicalism as long asthis change or extension etc. is not necessitated by the need to accommodate anymental phenomena.

Of the definitions of ‘physicalism’ existing in the literature, Papineau’s (Pa-pineau 2002) seems to come closest to this, and it may therefore be reasonableto have a closer look at it. On p. 41, he defines ‘physical’ to mean “identifiablenon-mentally-and -non-biologically” (emphasis his), a property he also calls ‘inan-imate’. Here, ‘mentally’ and ‘biologically identifiable’ refer to the specific waysof “picking out” certain properties as mental or biological, respectively. Underthis definition, his claim that the ‘physical’ (or ‘inanimate’, as he also calls it) iscausally complete, together with the obvious fact that mental phenomena have

effects in the ‘physical’ realm, entails that every mental phenomenon is identicalto a ‘physical’ phenomenon. This is therefore Papineau’s version of physicalism:

Conscious causes have inanimate effects. Inanimate effects have fullinanimate causes. So conscious properties must be identical with (orrealized by) inanimate properties. (p. 42)

13See, e.g., Stapp (1995).




The similarity of this to our version of physicalism lies mainly in the factthat it is very much tailored to the needs of a philosopher of mind. Apparently,Papineau offers here quite an elegant solution to the problem of defining ‘physi-calism’ in that he completely avoids reference to any actual or ideal physics, butit may prima facie also be seen as somewhat inelegant insofar as it presupposesthe distinction between various (kinds of) ways in which to “identify” properties

– namely, the ‘mental’ and the ‘biological’ ways, in addition to further ones that,for his purposes, need not themselves be defined. Now, the concept of ‘the mental’is inevitably presupposed by our definition as well, and it seems reasonable toassume that there will then also be some special kind of way in which ‘the mental’can be identified, so this does not constitute much of a disadvantage relative toour definition. As for the biological way of identifying properties, Papineau has tomake this presupposition for certain technical reasons that do not need to interestus. There may be problems with defining what exactly is supposed to differentiateour way of identifying biological properties from the way in which we identify, say,chemical ones. However, for all we know, these problems may yet be overcomesomehow, and in any case, we need not look any deeper into this issue, as there isanother problem with Papineau’s definition that is much closer to the surface.

Suppose for the moment that substance dualism is correct and that in addition

to the fields and particles known from physics, we also have a Cartesian res cogi-tans. Clearly, this assumption would be utterly incompatible with any reasonableversion of physicalism. But then, nothing about it excludes the possibility that thehypothetical res cogitans or its specifically mental properties are ‘identifiable’ notonly in a specifically mental way, but also in some non-mental way. For example,it might be that the res cogitans manifests itself in certain localised disturbances of space-time that, to a human eye, appear as some kind of ‘ghosts’. Moreover, let usassume that each and every mentally identifiable property of the res cogitans un-mistakeably manifests itself in the nature of those disturbances and thereby also inthe appearance of the resulting ‘ghosts’. What we have in such a scenario is a wayin which instantiations of those ‘mentally identifiable’ properties have effects thatmake them also ‘non-mentally identifiable’.14 The ‘identification’ will admittedlybe somewhat indirect, but so is the ‘identification’ of many other non-mentallyidentifiable properties, like, e.g., the charge and spin of electrons. Since this possi-bility of identifcation holds by hypothesis for every mentally identifiable propertyof the res cogitans, it follows that under Papineau’s definition, the scenario justoutlined, as outlandish as it certainly is, has still to be regarded as consonantwith physicalism. But, of course, no-one would seriously consider that scenario asphysicalistic, and hence, Papineau’s definition is inadequate. Furthermore, thereseems to be no way to salvage it from this objection. It may still be useful todistinguish positions according to which everything ‘mentally identifiable’ is also‘non-mentally identifiable’ from those that do not entail this kind of implication,but insofar as the former positions are compatible with the existence of a res cog-itans manifesting itself in the form of ‘ghosts’, they surely ought not to be calledforms of physicalism.

Returning now to our own definition, what can in view of our previous remarksbe said of the notion of ‘physicalism’ defined by it? Is it more likely than Stoljar’sto occur in one of the central stages of a philosophical argument? I should thinkso. For, if physicalism is correct, this means nothing else than that either a

14There is a certain ambiguity here in that “them” may refer both to the properties and to theirinstantiations. However, I do not think this ambiguity is harmful in any way, since, if I understandPapineau correctly, ‘identifying’ a given property means just to identify an instantiation of it assuch (i.e., as an instantiation of that property).




scepticist or a reductionist approach to the explanation of mental phenomenais required. Conversely, if physicalism is wrong, we will have to choose one of the other approaches, i.e., revisionism or one of the two dualisms.15 On Stoljar’sconception, things would look considerably less clear. Knowing whether or notthe metaphysical picture that best fits the structure of our world bears a “familyresemblance” to our (more or less) familiar physical theories does not really help

us in selecting any approach with regard to the mind-body problem, and wouldprobably not be much more useful in solving any other philosophical problemeither.

Of course, one can now object that under our definition, ‘physicalism’ is arather superfluous term, since it merely denotes the disjunction of scepticism andreductionism. But I do not think this should worry us. The term ‘parent’ can like-wise be regarded as denoting a disjunction, since, for almost all practical purposes,it is coextensive with the expression ‘mother or father’, but this does surely notentail its uselessness. It seems better to have a somewhat redundant but clearlydefined term than one that, because of its vagueness, cannot be made any practicaluse of at all.

1.3.2 A Priori vs A Posteriori

Let us now briefly turn to the recent debate between ‘a priori physicalism’ and‘a posteriori physicalism’.16 I am putting these labels in quotes here because,contrary to what they might suggest, the positions denoted by them do not claimthat physicalism is an a priori or, respectively, an a posteriori doctrine. Thatphysicalism can only be true or false a posteriori is entirely obvious. Or at least,this follows if the alternative, namely that physicalism is true or false a priori , isunderstood such that the a priori is non-defeasible. Thus conceived, the statementthat physicalism is true or false a posteriori does not say much more than thatphysicalism is not logically true, which certainly is obvious.

But the debate is, as I said, not about the epistemological or modal statusof physicalism. Instead, the question at issue is whether a physicalist should becommitted to an a priori entailment from physical facts (including a ‘That’s all’-

clause and indexical facts such as ‘I am now here, looking into that direction’) topsychological facts (including those about consciousness). Jackson, who startedthe debate with his Jackson (1997) and Jackson (1998), argues as follows that theanswer is yes:

Consider, for instance, a supplementation of our earlier inference:

(1) Over 60 percent of the Earth is covered by H2O.

(2) H2O fills the water role [being the clear, potable liquid we bathein etc.].

15Prima facie, there would be the further alternative of waiting a number of years in hopesthat, e.g., physicalism 2020 might provide the solution to the mind-body problem. But obviously,this is not really a further alternative. One must take into consideration that revisionism, too, isto be understood in relation to a given theoretical paradigm. So, even if the mind-body problem

will be solved by physicalism 2020, in relation to our current physics, expecting such an eventwould still qualify as a belief in the disjunction of revisionism and dualism (the latter becausewe cannot now know whether, by the year 2020, physicalist theories will have taken on a dualistform).16See Jackson (1997) and Jackson (1998, ch. 3) as well as, e.g., Block and Stalnaker (1999);

Chalmers and Jackson (2001); Stoljar (2000). I do not know of any more recent publications onthis topic, but the debate seemed still alive in the fall of 2003, when Frank Jackson and BrianMcLaughlin held talks entitled “Why We Should Be A Priori Physicalists” and “Why Physi-

calists Should Be A Posteriori Physicalists”, respectively, on the GAP.5 conference in Bielefeld(Germany).




(3) Therefore, over 60 percent of the Earth is covered by water.

[...] We did not know that (1) entailed (3) until we learnt (2), becausewe did not, and could not, have known that (1) and (3) express thesame proposition until we learned (2). But as soon as we learn (2), wehave the wherewithal, if we are smart enough, to move a priori to (3).(1997, p. 490)17

The reason why Jackson is using the concept of water here, and not somepsychological concept, is that he assumes that, from a physicalist point of view,psychological concepts work basically the same way as ‘water’ does, and that thelatter can therefore serve as a good example to make his point. To be moreprecise, Jackson holds that physicalists (or at least those of them he is addressing)think that psychological concepts have “roles” associated with them by which theirreference is fixed, in the sense that whatever satisfies such a role is contained inthe extension of the respective concept. His argument then proceeds by notingthat, if physicalism is true, all the (“contextual”) facts about what roles are filledby what will be physical, and so, of course, will be these role-fillers themselves,as well as all the other facts about them. Now, from those “contextual” facts, wecan a priori derive what physical things form the extensions of what psychological

concepts, and from those other facts (analogous to (1) in the above quotation), wecan equally a priori infer the corresponding psychological facts (analogous to (3)above).

As far as I can see, this argument is perfectly valid; the only way to attack it isto refute its premise that all psychological concepts are associated with reference-fixing “roles”.18 It is exactly here, however, where the weakness of the argumentlies. Consider the case of phenomenal concepts, which clearly form a subclass of the “psychological concepts” Jackson talks about. These phenomenal conceptsdenote the properties that one can recognise in one’s own states when one, e.g.,attends to the kind of visual perceptions produced in oneself by looking at yellowthings, or to the kind of smell produced by honey, etc. It is difficult to see whatroles these concepts should be associated with; indeed, as Brian Loar argues in hisPhenomenal States (1997), these concepts are “irreducibly demonstrative”, whicheffectively rules out the existence of any roles by which their reference might befixed. I am not here going to reproduce Loar’s argument, as I think that theabsence of reference-fixing roles for phenomenal concepts is already intuitivelyobvious. Besides, the question of whether a priori or a posteriori physicalismprovides the optimal interpretation of ‘physicalism’ is not particularly importantfor our purposes, and so it is not much use to press the issue here. But at anyrate, phenomenal concepts, as well as Loar’s paper, deserve to be mentioned inconnection with physicalism, since a popular class of antiphysicalist argumentscentre on just those concepts. Loar’s paper nicely shows what is wrong with thesearguments.19

1.4 The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment

I have taken the term ‘The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment’ from Chalmers(1996, ch. 5). For brevity, what it refers to will in this section simply be called

17Essentially the same argument is given in Jackson (1998, p. 82f.).18Block and Stalnaker (1999) have thought otherwise, attacking instead the idea of a priori

entailment even for such concepts as ‘water’. Correspondingly, their arguments have been shownto fail by Chalmers and Jackson (2001).19Alternatively, cf. Hill (1997), as well as Hill and McLaughlin (1999).




‘the Paradox’. It goes back to Shoemaker (1975), who does not yet explicitlyregard it as a paradox, but instead uses it in an argument for the possibility of a functionalist analysis of “qualitative states” (i.e., phenomenal states of the sortmentioned at the end of the previous section). In his paper, Shoemaker askswhether it is plausible that the qualitative character of a mental state shouldbe independent from the state’s functional properties, i.e., its causal relations

to inputs, outputs, and other functional states. Such independence would entailthat for two systems that are in the same functional state, this state might havequalitative character only in one of the systems. We can see here how Shoemaker’squestion is relevant for the issue of physicalism vs anti-physicalism: namely, manyanti-physicalists base their position precisely on the claim that such independencebetween functional and qualitative properties is indeed possible.20

The problem that the supposition of this independence leads to is, accordingto Shoemaker, that we would have exactly the same introspective beliefs aboutour mental states, whether these in fact have qualitative character or not. Fromthis, it would follow immediately that our introspection is to the very least noreliable indicator of qualitative character. But if we cannot tell by introspectionwhether our mental states have qualitative character or not, what other evidencecould there be? Apparently, none at all. For,

[t]here could [under the assumption that functional and qualitativeproperties are independent of each other] be no possible physical effectsof any state from which we could argue by an ‘inference to the bestexplanation’ that it has qualitative character; for if there were, wecould give at least a partial functional characterization of the havingof qualitative character by saying that it tends to give rise, in suchand such circumstances, to those physical effects, and could not notallow that a state lacking qualitative character could be functionallyidentical to [or in other words, the same functional state as] a statehaving it. (p. 297)

Hence, one would have to conclude that there is simply no way of telling whetherour mental states have qualitative character or not. The absurdity of this conse-quence stands to reason:

[O]f course it is absurd to suppose that ordinary people are talkingabout something that is in principle unknowable by anyone when theytalk about how they feel, or about how things look, smell, sound, etc.to them. (Indeed, just as a causal theory of knowledge would implythat states or features that are independent of the causal powers of thethings they characterize would be in principle unknowable, so a causaltheory of reference would imply that such states and features are inprinciple unnamable [sic] and inaccessible to reference.) (ibid.)

So, if qualitative character is independent of functional properties, we would notonly have no way of knowing about our qualitative states, but neither would we be

20

We have to be careful, however, as to the degree of possibility involved. For, on the one hand,hardly anyone – physicalist or not – denies that that independence is logically possible. But onthe other hand, while physicalists do deny that it is metaphysically possible, this is not anythingthat would separate them from every anti-physicalist, not even if the latter’s position is basedon considerations about qualitative character. For example, the view Chalmers expresses in The

Conscious Mind , though anti-physicalist, implies that the said independence is not metaphysi-cally possible, since qualitative character is, according to his suggestions in the eighth chapterof his book, just another “aspect” of functionally definable information states. In his view, thelink between functional and qualitative properties is thus metaphysically necessary. This move,however, does not save him from the Paradox, as will become clearer further below.




able even to talk about them! These two aspects of the problem are what I will callthe epistemic and the semantic aspect of the Paradox, respectively. Note that bothof them, at least insofar as they are formulated by Shoemaker, presuppose a certaincausal theory: the epistemic aspect presupposes a causal theory of knowledge, andthe semantic aspect a causal theory of reference. This seems to open a possibleroute of escape from the Paradox, since one might well argue that a causal theory

is appropriate neither for all kinds of knowledge nor for all kinds of reference.21

However, although this may offer some hope of rebutting Shoemaker’s argument,the Paradox itself is not escaped this easily. Before we come to this, let us see howChalmers formulates it in The Conscious Mind :

The problem is this. We have seen that consciousness itself cannotbe reductively explained. But phenomenal judgments lie in the domainof psychology and in principle should be reductively explainable bythe usual methods of cognitive science. There should be a physicalor functional explanation of why we are disposed to make the claimsabout consciousness that we do, for instance, and of how we makethe judgments we do about conscious experience. It then follows thatour claims and judgments about consciousness can be explained in

terms quite independent of consciousness. More strongly, it seems thatconsciousness is explanatorily irrelevant to our claims and judgmentsabout consciousness. This result I call the paradox of phenomenal

judgment . (p. 177)

I should note here that the term ‘judgment’ has been introduced by Chalmers asa temporary replacement for ‘belief’, in order to block largely irrelevant antiphys-icalist objections to the effect that phenomenal beliefs are always co-constitutedby the appropriate qualitative experiences and thus do not “lie in the domain of psychology”, and should not in principle be “reductively explainable by the usualmethods of cognitive science”.22 Loosely put, a judgment is what my brain doeswhen I believe something. Or in Chalmers’ words: “We can think of a judgmentas what is left of a belief after any associated phenomenal quality is subtracted”(p. 174).23

Even so, the quoted passage is still somewhat enthymematic, since the simplestatement that “consciousness is explanatorily irrelevant to our claims and judg-

21Chalmers (1996, ch. 5) has taken this route. N.B.: I am not saying that it would in fact beinappropriate to adopt a causal theory of knowledge or reference in the relevant cases, only thatone might argue that way.22Cf. Chalmers (1996, p. 178):

One way to resist [the Paradox] would be to argue that the full content of myclaims and beliefs cannot be reductively explained, because consciousness plays arole in constituting that content. One might argue that a zombie’s claims and beliefs[i.e., the claims and beliefs of a creature whose states ‘lack qualitative character’, asShoemaker would put it] are different claims and beliefs, for example (although theylook and sound just the same!), because a zombie would not have the full concept of consciousness. But at the very least it is still puzzling that consciousness should beirrelevant to the sounds we make when talking about consciousness, to the finger

movements I am making now, and so on; so this response doe not remove thefull sense of bafflement. So I will set aside this way of thinking for now, and willcontinue to think about claims and judgments in the “deflationary” way that allowsthat they can be reductively explained.

23It is therefore a little surprising that, in his later treatments of the Paradox (e.g., Chalmers1999, sect. 4, Chalmers 2003, sect. 4.3), Chalmers discusses the Paradox exclusively in termsof belief , and defends himself against it in almost exactly the same way as anticipated in theprevious footnote. Thus, I cannot see how those later treatments should be more successful indefending him against the Paradox.




ments about consciousness” is in itself certainly not paradoxical. The Paradoxemerges only as we combine this statement with the following three propositions:

(1) My observational judgments about my own consciousness are usually justi-fied.

(2) An observational judgment to the effect that S is the case (for some state

of affairs S ) can be justified only insofar as S is causally relevant for that judgment.

(3) If consciousness is causally relevant for a given judgment, it must also beexplanatorily relevant for it.

Although (3) is only a simplifying and, as we will see further below, rather prob-lematic assumption, I take all three of these propositions to be at least intuitivelyplausible. By ‘observational judgment’, I mean that kind judgment that is theresult of only a minimal amount of theorising, such as the judgment that the sunis shining, reached simply by looking out of the window and noticing how brighteverything is. Certainly, there may be no particularly sharp line between obser-vation and non-observation, but such a thing is not needed here, since it is fully

sufficient in order to show the anti-physicalist’s predicament to consider judgmentsthat are very clearly observational in character. That is, we can restrict the scopeof our discussion to such judgments as: ‘My visual experiences of ripe lemons tendto be like this’ (where, for “this”, insert some appropriate phenomenal concept),or ‘This is a conscious experience’, etc.

With this additional clarification in place, I think only an eliminativist woulddeny (1), and (2) may even count as analytically true, since we will hardly call astatement an ‘observation’ or ‘observational’ if the statement that it purports tobe an observation of has no role to play in its causal history. The “insofar” mayrequire further clarification, but a simple example will suffice here: If someone,on seeing a bird fly across a bright sunset, comments ‘Lo, a blue bird!’ withoutbeing able to discriminate any colours on the bird at all, this statement will countas an observation only insofar as it mentions that there is a bird. The additional

proposition that the bird is blue (whether true or not) will have to be left out if the statement is to be regarded as an observation in the full sense.

Now, to see the Paradox, note that it follows from (1) and (2) that the states of affairs my observational judgments speak of are in most cases causally relevant forthem. Since these include many statements similar to the lemon-example given twoparagraphs before, we may correspondingly infer that qualitative character, suchas is exemplified by the ‘yellow’-quale that is there pointed to by “this”, must oftenbe causally relevant for the production of the respective judgments. Because of (3), however, this squarely contradicts the explanatory irrelevance of consciousnessthat is the result of, on the one side, the supposed impossibility of giving a reductive(physicalist) explanation for consciousness, and, on the other side, the apparentfact that all our judgments are in that sense reductively explainable.24 The formerproposition is what makes a position anti-physicalist, at least insofar as one’s anti-

physicalism is based on the notion of consciousness. It is, of course, still possibleto be an anti-physicalist on the grounds that some other ‘features’ of the mindthan consciousness (such as, e.g., rationality) cannot be accommodated on thebasis of current physics; but it sems reasonable to suppose that the large majority

24The close conceptual connection between ‘consciousness’ and ‘qualitative character’ does, Ithink, not need to be pointed out. That is, I suppose it will be clear that, if qualitative characteris causally irrelevant for our judgments, then so is consciousness.




of anti-physicalists today as well as in history are or have been convinced of theirreducibility of consciousness, and that this is also the main source of motivationfor their anti-physicalism. As to the other proposition – that all our judgmentsare physicalistically reducible –, this seems to be just what one should assume,given that the brain is made of matter, and seeing the apparent completeness,for all practical intents and purposes, of our understanding of the ways in which

that matter behaves. It will be agreed that, in the light of the success withwhich current physics is able to handle other phenomena of the known world,positions like interactionist dualism or emergentist property dualism do not lookvery attractive.

The Paradox consists in the fact that at least one of the following three claimsmust be abandoned if the others are to be upheld (provided the ‘technical’ premises(2) and (3) are correct): the claim that one’s observational phenomenal judgmentsare justified; anti-physicalism with respect to what these judgments speak of;and the claim that they are reductively explainable. Clearly, this fact poses aserious problem for every anti-physicalist who wishes to regard his observationalphenomenal judgments as evidence for the existence of something (qualitativecharacter, say) that cannot be physicalistically accounted for while at the sametime staying uncommitted to the idea that this something is causally relevant for

those judgments. In particular, it poses a problem for practically every kind of epiphenomenalism.

In order to defend epiphenomenalism against the Paradox, one might considerattacking either of the premises (2) and (3). For example, one might questionthe idea that the link between a state of affairs and its observation must in everycase be a causal link for the observation to count as justified. If for two kinds of events A and B, the B-events are in a certain sense ‘the other side of the coin’of the A-events, it may be argued that then an observation of an A-event wouldin some cases justify an observational judgment to the effect that a B-event hasalso happened.25 One might even say that, in this case, the link between A- andB-events is ‘even better’ than any causal connection could be. To give an example,the break-up of certain kinds of intermolecular bonds between H2O molecules canperhaps be seen as ‘the other side of the coin’ of the melting of ice.26 At leastfor the sake of argument, let us assume it can. In any case, this kind of relationbetween two events is indeed ‘even better’ than any causal relation in the usualsense. For, if someone observes the break-up of certain kinds of bonds betweenH2O molecules, it seems plain that he can then also be regarded as a witness of the melting of ice, and that his judgment to the effect that ice is being meltedwill at least in some cases count as justified. So, if those two concepts: ‘meltingof ice’ and ‘break-up of such-and-such bonds between H2O molecules’ should at

25For the relevance of this kind of suggestion in the present context, cf. Chalmers’ “double-aspect principle” (1996, ch. 8), as well as his remarks on the justification of phenomenal belief (2003).26Although it might be argued that these two kinds of events are in fact one and the same.

Since we are here talking of judgments and their justification, however, events and kinds of eventsmust in the present context be individuated in as fine-grained a way as propositions. The reason

why I am here nevertheless talking of events and not of propositions is that the defender of epiphenomenalism may have yet another kind of link in mind, different from the connection thatholds between two propositions denoting the same state of affairs. And the reason why I amtalking of events and not of states of affairs is simply a matter of convenience; the conceptualdifference between ‘event’ and ‘state of affairs’ does not matter in the present context. Finally,to take as example, as we have done here, a relation between two kinds of events that practicallyamounts to their identity is justified because, whatever other connection the defender may havein mind, it cannot possibly be closer than this. Since we are, on the other hand, also consideringthe ‘usual’ kind of causal connection, what we will say about both of these exemplary relationswill plausibly also hold for any relation that may ‘lie between them’.




all be seen as denoting different events, the relation between such events mustclearly be counted among those relations by which an observational judgment canbe justified. In consequence, this either refutes premise (2) above, or we mustbroaden our understanding of ‘causally relevant’ in such a way as to imply thatthe kind of relation just considered makes its relata causally relevant for eachother. For the sake of a charitable interpretation of our premises, I propose we

take the latter course, so that premise (2) can be upheld. (On the other hand, if werefuse to regard concepts like ‘melting of ice’ and ‘break-up of such-and-such bondsbetween H2O molecules’ as denoting different events, there will be no problem atall – except that I would know of no good example to illustrate what might bemeant by two events’ representing ‘two sides of the same coin’.) Moreover, letus for the moment also assume that the relata of whatever other kind of relationthe defender of epiphenomenalism may have in mind with his coin metaphor canlikewise be regarded as causally relevant for each other.

From this broadening of our understanding of ‘causal relevance’, which we haveundertaken in order to save premise (2), it follows that we can no longer be sureof premise (3). This can easily be seen: if a B-event is ‘the other side of the coin’of an A-event and is thus (as we assumed) causally relevant for it, it is thereby notguaranteed also to be explanatorily relevant for it, just like the melting of ice is not

explanatorily relevant for the break-up of bonds between H2O molecules.27 So, if we manage to save premise (2) by broadening the concept of ‘causal relevance’,premise (3) becomes problematic. Does this mean that the anti-physicalist has achance of averting the Paradox at least for cases where qualitative character is onlycausally, but not explanatorily relevant for observational phenomenal judgments?

Well, no: because proposition (2) does by no means formulate a sufficientcondition for the justification of an observational judgment. For an observational

judgment to the effect that S to be justified, it is only required , not sufficient, thatS be causally relevant for that judgment. For, evidently, if I observe a certain stateof affairs to be the case, this does not automatically justify my judgment aboutits causes – even though these causes will trivially also be causally relevant for my

judgment (via the observation of their effect). It is perfectly possible that I shouldobserve S , that S should be caused by another state of affairs C , and that I alsocorrectly judge that C , but that this judgment should nevertheless not be justified.After all, it may be just a wild guess. And moreover, it does not seem as if any‘special kind’ of causal relevance could change anything about this. My judgmentmay be a completely unjustified guess if C is an entirely ‘normal’ cause of S (e.g.,if S is the fact that a certain window is broken and C the fact that a stone hasbeen thrown into it), and it may just as well be an unjustified guess if C is ‘theother side of the coin’ of S (e.g., if S is the melting of water and C the break-upof certain kinds of bonds between H2O molecules). Certainly, if I observe that awindow is broken, I may be justified in believing that a stone has been throwninto it, but only if I have some independent reason to believe that the latter isa likely cause of the former. If I had known nothing whatsoever about windowsand stones in general, my belief would not have been justified at all. This seems

quite uncontroversial. And similarly, if I observe the melting of some piece of ice, Imay be justified in thinking that what is going on is the break-up of certain bondsbetween H2O molecules, but only if I know that this is what the melting of iceconsists in. In the light of these considerations (informal though they be) it is hardto see how there could be any kind of causal relevance where something similar

27Of course, it may be argued that for the latter event, the melting of ice is also not causally

relevant , but let us be generous. Perhaps there are other relations where causal relevance doesobtain without explanatory relevance.




would not be required for the justification of an observational judgment. Whatthis means for the anti-physicalist will be clear: the causal relevance of qualitativecharacter alone is not enough if there is not independent reason to believe in thisrelevance. In other words, the anti-physicalist may not regard his observationalphenomenal judgments as justified as long as he has no independent reason tobelieve that the states of affairs they speak of are causally relevant for them.

This result may strike some as absurd. Are we really being told that if it seemsto us that we have such-and-such a kind of experience, the corresponding judg-ment (‘I have such-and-such a kind of experience’) is not necessarily justified? Inprinciple, yes – but it depends on the way in which ‘experience’ is understood. Ihave here been presupposing an antiphysicalist reading, according to which phe-nomenal judgments are interpreted as referring to things and states of affairs thatcannot physicalistically be accounted for. On such an interpretation, the aboveconsiderations do indeed entail (or at least, strongly suggest) that observationalphenomenal judgments are not justified unless there is independent reason to be-lieve that the states of affairs they speak of are causally relevant for them. If onestill feels uncomfortable about regarding one’s observational phenomenal judg-ments as unjustified, I suggest a simple cure: just stop interpreting them in an antiphysicalist way . Instead, one may adopt a self-referential interpretation. For,

the apparently only way to interpret those judgments that makes them immedi-ately justified (i.e., justified without the ‘help’ of additional beliefs) is to take themas reporting states of affairs concerning nothing but the judgments themselves, ormore precisely, concerning nothing but the intrinsic properties of the brain eventsthat the judgments consist in.28 We see here how the two aspects of the Paradoxmentioned above interact: if the observational phenomenal judgments are to beimmediately justified (epistemic aspect), they cannot be interpreted as referringto non-physical states of affairs (semantic aspect), or conversely, if they are sointerpreted, they cannot be immediately justified.

This may again be hard to swallow, since one may have difficulty seeing how ourordinary observational judgments about the external world could ever be justifiedaccording to this reasoning. For, according to it, we would first need to havesome independent reason to believe that the states of affairs that those judgmentsare taken to report are causally relevant for them, and what reason could thisbe? The answer I would most like to give has already been given countless timesbefore: inference to the best explanation, based on our phenomenal judgments.On this account, I am justified in believing that there is an outside world, thatI am sitting on a chair etc. because this is what offers the best way of makingsense of my observations, the most immediate of which are my (observational)phenomenal judgments. Of course, this view is not as popular among philosophersas one might wish, and the sheer amount that has already been written on thesubject makes it impossible adequately to defend it within the space of this thesis.I am therefore not going to defend it here. But neither do I need to. As the aboveexamples have shown (i.e., the broken window and the melting ice; but it wouldbe trivial to invent more), the causal relevance of a state of affairs S with respect

to a judgment to the effect that S is the case is simply not enough to justify it.Hence, in those cases where the judgment is justified, there must be something else

28In this connection, it should be kept in mind that judgments are not necessarily beliefs.Judgments are physical states almost by definition (although they might not be physicalisticallyexplainable, if interactionist dualism were correct). Beliefs, on the other hand, might be nothingelse than brain-states, too (and they even will be if physicalism is correct), but for all we know,they might also be states of something else connected to a cognitive system that ‘does thethinking’ for it. We will have to come back to this possibility in the third chapter.




in addition, and it is clearly part of the anti -physicalist’s burden to specify whatthis additional factor might consist in. This is now not necessarily a paradox. If it is possible to provide an independent reason to believe that non-physical statesof affairs are causally relevant for our phenomenal judgments, these might be

justified even if interpreted anti-physicalistically, because it may then (perhaps)be justified to draw inferences from the judgments themselves (i.e., from their

existence and properties – not their content, unless interpreted self-referentially)to the non-physical states of affairs causally relevant for them.

Until such a reason is given, it will be wrong to regard, as so many anti-physicalists have done, one’s phenomenal judgments as direct evidence for cor-responding non-physical states of affairs; this is the main lesson of the Paradox.What one would now like to know is of course whether there is any such reason tobe given and if so, what it consists in. The following chapters may be seen as anattempt to develop a positive answer to this question.



CHAPTER 2. SUBJECTIVITY: PRELIMINARIES 23

from the empirical and more towards the theoretical, in particular, towards theepistemological. Hence ‘epistemological subjectivity’. It is to this notion that theconcept of subjectivity belongs that we are going to develop in the third chapterand on which our argument against physicalism will then be based.

To be sure, abstraction does not guarantee metaphysical relevance, and byfar not every concept that can be subsumed under the label of ‘epistemological

subjectivity’ leads to an even remotely successful argument against physicalism.2

The metaphysical relevance of our concept of subjectivity will be ensured by theway in which we are going to ‘derive’ it from more basic concepts. The mostbasic of these will be the concept of data , which we will introduce in the nextsection and defend against a number of criticisms in the section that follows it.On this basis, we will then introduce the concepts of ‘I’ and ‘accessibility’, and itwill be from ‘accessibility’ that our concept of subjectivity will be derived in thefollowing chapter. Since that concept – as I hope will become evident in due course– can plausibly be seen as the ‘core’ of the notion of epistemological subjectivity,it seems appropriate to refer to it as the epistemological concept of subjectivity.Finally, we will, in the last section of this chapter, briefly introduce the semanticalframework in which our subsequent talk about contexts and possibilities is goingto be interpreted.

2.1 The Concept of Data

Being our conceptual starting-point, the concept of data must strictly speakingremain undefined; only an informal explication can be asked for. A succinct way togive such an explication would be this: The data are the directly given truths, thetrue propositions I am entitled in believing without inference and without auxil-iary assumptions.3 Of course, this short statement is quite in need of elaboration.What is meant by “without inference”, however, will be clear. As for “withoutauxiliary assumptions”, an example: I do believe that I am at this moment look-ing at a laptop screen, and I am certainly entitled to this belief, even though Inever performed any inference in order to reach it: I just look at the screen and

straightway recognise it as the screen of my laptop. However, I would certainlynot be entitled to this belief if I did not hold the auxiliary assumption that I amawake and properly functioning in a world that pretty much is as it seems to be(as opposed to being drugged, or a brain in a vat, etc.). Hence, that I am nowlooking at a laptop screen is not amongst the set of truths that I here call ‘data’.So much for a negative example.

For lack of an adequate idiom, positive examples of what is meant by ‘data’ aremuch more difficult to provide. Accordingly, the items of the following list haveto be taken with a pinch of salt:

• Stabbing pain in left shoulder.

• White spot in centre of visual field.

• Memory trace of sudden sound, fading.

• Faint awareness of temporal distance from dinner to now.

2Cf., for example, the concepts of subjectivity William Lycan discusses in the third chapterof his Consciousness and Experience (1996).

3N.B.: the true propositions I am entitled in believing, not necessarily those that I do believe.It may be noted that, in this emphasis on warrant instead of knowledge, I am taking a similarapproach to the one endorsed by Charles Siewert in his Significance of Consciousness (1998).




• Facilitating influence of that awareness on the – somewhat less faint – aware-ness that it will soon be 11pm.

These items could be seen as descriptions of events, but I would rather have themunderstood simply as descriptions of states of affairs, i.e., as propositions, forreasons to to be discussed below. As for the “pinch of salt” with which thesedescriptions should be taken, every concept employed in them has to be given apurely ‘phenomenal’ reading, shorn of anything external or inter-subjective. Forexample, take “Stabbing pain in left shoulder”. The state that this describes is afeeling that I can obviously have even without knowing that I have a shoulder. Butfrom a conventional reading of that description, I can infer that I, in fact, do havea shoulder, which is something that no amount of pain in my left shoulder couldteach me. Hence it follows that, under a conventional reading, the description doesnot count as a “directly given truth” or datum. Rather, the word “shoulder” hasto be given a ‘phenomenal’ reading, employing not the public concept of ‘shoulder’,but the mode of presentation in which a shoulder of mine is presented to me when,e.g., I feel it hurting. If, as seems plausible, there is no such mode of presentation,since I only have a phenomenal concept of my left shoulder (instead of a genericone), then we have to backtrack a little and parse the description in a more coarse-

grained way, treating “left shoulder” as primitive.In view of our informal conceptions of consciousness etc., it is worthwhile point-ing out that the concept of data is a decidedly subjective one (as one might putit). Although we have here given an account of the concept that hopefully helpsother ‘subjects’ to an idea of what ‘their data’ are (and which, in this sense, couldbe regarded as ‘intersubjective’), it would be wrong to assume that ‘data’ is aconcept that can be freely applied to other cases than one’s own. If it were thatway, then ‘data’ would be similar to the ordinary concept of ‘consciousness’. Weare relatively liberal in applying this concept, provided we do not see convincingreasons for its inapplicability. Consequently, apart from ourselves, we make use of it when talking of other humans and also in the case of other species, as long asthey are reasonably responsive to their environments, and as long as their level of behavioural complexity is sufficiently close to ours (or higher, as the case might

be for members of hypothetical extraterrestrial civilisations).4

Unfortunately, though, two things about this practice make the concept of ‘consciousness’ ineligible as a conceptual starting point. First of all, the conceptis apparently quite tied up with the notion of having consciousness, i.e., a relationfrom consciousness to something else. Whenever we speak of consciousness, it isthereby implied that there is something else that ‘has’ it, without its being clearat all whether this apparent necessity of ‘being had’ by something is a conceptualor nomological necessity or whether it only appears to hold because we simply donot (or cannot) know of any cases where consciousness is not ‘had’ by somethingelse. This close and not very well-defined affiliation with another concept countsstrongly against making ‘consciousness’ our conceptual starting point. Moreover,even if the nature of the connection between ‘consciousness’ and ‘having conscious-ness’ were already known, there might still be another problem. Namely, if that

connection were to turn out such that ‘being had’ by something is constitutivefor a given consciousness, the concept of ‘consciousness’ would be burdened withfurther unclarity stemming from the fact that it is unknown not only to whichorganisms (or things) the property of ‘having consciousness’ can be ascribed, but

4Note that these remarks on ‘data’ being a subjective concept are not meant to be constitutivefor this concept. It is only intended to contrast it with the popular notion of consciousness. Forthis purpose, it was necessary to make use of the related ‘folk-concepts’ of subject and subjective,but this should not be seen as entailing that the concept of data is based on that of subjectivity.




also what ‘having consciousness’ consists in in the first place. Now contrast thiswith the situation of the concept of data currently being proposed. Our introspec-tive capacities may not be as acute as they would have to be in order to extractevery nuance of our mental lives, but we certainly have a clear idea of what tolook for, unhindered by any connections with mysterious further concepts.

Still, it can be asked: “But why ‘data ’? Could it not be that a concept of

consciousness purged from its affiliation to the concept of ‘having consciousness’is a better conceptual starting point?” Apparently not. Together with ‘experi-ence’, ‘mental life’, and ‘phenomenology’, ‘consciousness’ belongs to a group of concepts whose members are here taken to be virtually interchangeable salva ver-itate, barring only linguistic inconvenience.5 In a way, it is true that the conceptof ‘data’, as it has been introduced above, can also be seen as belonging to thisgroup. However, there are two crucial differences that make the concept of ‘data’more suitable as a starting point than any of the others. The first is that ‘data’is a subjective concept, as has just been emphasised. The second difference liesin the fact that data are defined as certain truths. This distinguishes this conceptfrom the other members of that group, since, on my understanding at least, what‘consciousness’ and ‘mental life’ refer to are sets of experiences rather than truths.As for ‘phenomenology’, the case is not quite as clear, but it would initially at

least seem somewhat strange to say that “phenomenology is a set of truths”. Itmay be possible (cf. sect. 3.1.2 below), but we would then still be needing a namefor these truths that comprise a phenomenology. And whatever that name (‘data’,I think, would suggest itself), it would then clearly designate the more primitiveconcept. So, how about ‘experience’? This concept is certainly much more fa-miliar than that of ‘data’; crucially, however, it is not as ontologically innocent.Data, as we know, are truths, and truths, being nothing but true propositions,are straightforward meta-theoretical entities carrying no ontological commitmentwhatsoever: Without having even the slightest idea about the actual ontology of our world, we can justifiably assert, e.g., that ‘5+7=12’ is a truth. Experiences,on the other hand, are usually thought of as events, talk about which carries muchmore ontological commitment than talk about propositions. In particular, talkabout events presupposes the ‘existence’ (in a certain sense) of time. And, al-though this might be seen as a commitment we can easily shoulder, it can stillbe argued that it would be an unnecessary burden, and consequently, it appearswe should rather continue talking about data instead. Furthermore, qua events(more specifically, event-tokens), experiences have to be regarded as reaching allthe way down the levels of reality, and of course, not all of these levels are actually‘experienced’ (or ‘conscious’). So, if we were to operate with experiences insteadof data, we would constantly have to separate the conscious aspects of experiencesfrom the non-conscious ones, a complication that is automatically avoided if weuse the concept of data instead.

Before we come to deal with objections to the concept of data, we brieflyneed to address the issue of what kinds of truths data should be conceived of from a formal point of view. Truths, like propositions in general, can come in

all degrees of complexity, and it needs to be at least provisionally specified whichkinds of complexity should be ruled out in the case of data. To start with themost obvious restriction: data do fairly clearly not contain any ‘or’s or ‘if’s, sodisjuctions should be ruled out. The proposition ‘I have a pain in my left should ora pressure in my right ear’ (appropriately interpreted) will not count as a datum,for either I have the one or the other (or both), and that proposition, instead of

5Some might want ‘mental life’ also to incorporate un conscious psychological activities, butso be it. Their usage of the word will then be different from the one adopted here.




being a datum itself, will have to be inferred from that. Things may be somewhatless clear in the case of universal quantification. Consider the sentence ‘All I cansee is white’ (uttered in a snow storm, for instance): does this express a datumor rather a lack of data? If it does not qualify as a datum, how would we knowwhether the sentence is true? There are ways, however. It is, for example, quiteconceivable that, before we make that comment, we first try to perceive something

that is different from white, and the resulting (though evidently not very dramatic)disappointment is then the datum that makes us believe that we can see nothingbut white. And of course, universal quantification would make little sense unlesswe also allowed disjunction (since the sentence ‘All I can see is white’ is formalisedas ‘For all x, if I can see x, it is white’, which is only short for ‘x is white or I cannotsee it’). To be sure, this is no conclusive argument, but then, for our purposes,not much seems to hinge on the question of what logical forms are permissible fordata. So, as long as our specifications are at least intuitively plausible, there willbe little need for detailed discussion.

If it is correct to banish, as has just been suggested, both disjunction anduniversal quantification from the logical structure of data, this implies that theconjunction of all data can be brought into an attractively simple format. Namely,it can be written as a long conjunction of literals, preceded by an operator of

existential quantification, as follows:

∃x1, x2, . . . : L1 ∧ L2 ∧ . . . ,

where the literals Li (for i = 1, . . .) are near-atomic expressions of the form P (x) or(alternatively)¬P (x), with P standing for some predicate and x for some variablebound by the existential quantifier. It is an interesting question whether negativeliterals (the ‘¬P (x)’s) should be allowed or not, but again, this issue is not veryrelevant for our purposes, so that we shall not address it here. For pragmaticreasons, one might even say that we should also banish conjunctive data, becausethis would give us a determinate way of counting them, as every datum would thenbe a mere literal. But on the other hand, many of the things we would otherwisehave called data could then no longer be regarded as such, since they would be too

complex. Therefore, I would prefer to continue allowing conjunctive data, and onlyimpose the following restriction: that for every conjunctive datum, the conjunctsshould be at least indirectly connected with each other by shared variables (i.e.,it should not be possible to divide such a conjunction into two parts that do notshare any variables with each other).

2.2 Objections

The concept of data, as it has just been introduced, faces resistance from at leastthree different directions, each of which is associated with a famous author. Two of them, inspired by Wittgenstein and Sellars, respectively, will be dealt with ratherquickly, before we are going to spend much more time on the third objection, which

is inspired by the fifth chapter of Dennett’s Consciousness Explained . The mainreason for this is that Dennett’s text has shown itself to be extraordinarily effectivein creating a misleading “Anti-Cartesian” impression in many of its readers, andit will be instructive to examine somewhat more closely just how that impressionis created.




2.2.1 Inspired by Wittgenstein

Data are truths and as such, propositions. If it is asked why data are not simplyconceived of as sentences, the answer will be that sentences contain a lot of un-necessary detail – such as the order of the elements of a conjunction or the choicebetween words expressing the same concept – which propositions abstract awayfrom. The concepts that data are made up of are, however, rather comparableto words, and if we are talking about the “own terms” of a given mind, therebyreferring to its concepts – which might not be perfectly translatable to our own –,this may look a lot like talk of “private language”. And this again might of coursewell raise concern among Wittgensteinians.

To answer this concern would ideally require a clarification of what exactlythe problem (or problems) consists in, which in turn would presuppose an inter-pretation of Wittgenstein’s famous “private language argument”. Since this canobviously not be done here, it will be best simply to ignore that argument in thefollowing. I do not think that very much will be lost by this move, however; forit does not seem to me that Wittgenstein’s argument has much force against theexistence of so-to-speak ‘private concepts’ on any interpretation, and neither isthe existence of private concepts central to our anti-physicalist argument or to the

concept of data itself.Apart from the private language argument, there are certain remarks by Witt-genstein that can be taken to suggest that it is meaningless to speak as if wecould know our own mental states (in particular, see Wittgenstein 1953, §246).If this were true, it would obviously undercut our above talk about data, andamong many other things, would make it completely mysterious how I could havecome up with the examples listed on p. 23. But then, I must say that I find ithard to take this kind of objection very seriously.6 An alternative and somewhatmore worthwhile course of argument would be to question the reliability of ourintrospective knowledge. This, however, would be not so much a Wittgensteinianas a Sellarsian point.

2.2.2 Inspired by Sellars

A sceptic inspired by Sellars’ attack on the “Myth of the Given”7 might objectthat there is no guarantee that our introspective access to sensations and the likeis infallible. We said above that, regarding data, we “have a clear idea of what tolook for”, but what reason is there to be so confident that our mental lives are aswe think they are? I think this is a good question; actually, two good questions.The first one asks how I can know that what I take to be data really are data,and the second one, how I can be sure that the data I know of really comprisean important part of the total data, and not just a completely marginal fractionthereof. As to the second question, note that we have already conceded the possibleincompleteness of our introspective knowledge. It is not a very large step from hereto the concession that our beliefs about our mental lives may sometimes be wrong,and I am ready to make that concession. However, it should be clear that we

nevertheless have every right to be confident that our introspective judgments arefor the most part correct and also cover the most important aspects of our mentallives.8 Just why we can be so confident is, of course, still a good question. It might

6For a more sympathetic treatment leading to essentially the same assessment, see Siewert(1998, sect. 1.6).

7Cf. Sellars (1963).8It may at this point be appropriate to emphasise that these introspective judgments are not

the data we have so far been talking about. Rather, the data are the truths that my introspection




turn out that this confidence can ultimately only be vindicated by a combinationof a sound psychosemantic theory and extensive knowledge about the functioningof our cognitive systems, which is not something that we shall here delve deeperin. For the time being, our trust in our introspective powers can perhaps onlybe justified by the fact that this trust appears to work. Be that as it may, thesupposition that we can dramatically and constantly be mistaken about our own

mental lives simply seems so absurd that it should – for the moment at least – besafe to move onward, presupposing its falsehood without further discussion.

This proposal, of course, is premised on a view of phenomenal judgment thatsharply differentiates between the judgments themselves and the mental stateswhich the judgments are about. This is as it must be if judgments are regardedmore or less as sentences, be it in English or in a hypothetical “inner language”.However, on a different view, one might also say that the mental states themselves– perceptions, sensations, thoughts etc. – can be seen as a kind of reflexive judg-ments. A visual perception of something green would, roughly speaking, count asa judgment that one is seeing something green out there, a sensation of bodilypain as a judgment to the effect that one is feeling a pain somewhere in one’sbody, and, in consequence, a bona fide judgment with the content P would haveto be viewed as, in addition, a judgment with the content of “I believe that P ”.

Now, such a position may be defensible,9 but it is, I think, not overly attractive.From a common sense point of view, it rather seems that, in order to yield anintrospective judgment, there is still a little something needed in addition to theintrospected mental state itself.10 But however that may be, the content of thesekinds of introspective judgments will on any such account largely, if not exclu-sively, be determined by the corresponding introspected mental states; and thiswill, then, only mean that those judgments may very well be infallible after all,Sellarsian criticisms notwithstanding. Of course, this infallibility would still notguarantee that the data I know of comprise more than just a “marginal fraction”of the total data, so something more needs to be said. For the time being, however,we will again simply rely on the sheer implausibility of the contrary supposition,and consequently assume that the data I know of do comprise the most importantpart of the total data. We shall return to the question as to why this assumptionis in fact correct at the end of the next chapter.

is trying to capture. As has been said above, they are “the propositions I am entitled in believingwithout inference and without auxiliary assumptions”, so they are neither these beliefs themselvesnor necessarily the actually believed-in propositions.

9For an argument to the effect that Aristotle may have held such a position (at least withrespect to perceptions), along with a very interesting defense of it, see Caston (2002).10Perhaps I should at this point say what I think this “little something” might consist in.

Well: as I see it, this “something” consists in an additional bit of structure (in the sense of ‘structure’ applicable to states) as it were wrapped around the mental state in question so as toyield a ‘larger’ mental state that could be paraphrased as: “I am experiencing this [perception,sensation, judgment, etc.]”. The “this” would here correspond to the mental state in question,and the “I am experiencing . . .” (without the “. . .”) to the “little something” that is needed toyield an introspective judgment. More plainly, one could say that, according to this view, theintrospective judgment simply consists in the instantiation of a functionally definable ‘acknowl-edgment relation’ between the (empirical) subject and the introspected state. This is obviously

somewhat like an inner-sense theory of introspection, except that it is much simpler: there isno recognition or conceptualisation of the introspected state, only ‘acknowledgment’. Of course,more would have to be said as to what exactly this ‘acknowledgment’ relation amounts to, buthere is certainly not the place to expound yet another theory of introspection. Correspondingly,these remarks should be taken as nothing more than a mere suggestion. (For more detailedconsiderations in more or less the same direction, see Papineau 2002, sect. 4.12, and in particularChalmers 2003. The latter also contains, in sect. 4.3, a more extensive discussion of the Sellarsiancritique of the “Myth of the Given”.)




2.2.3 Inspired by Dennett

The third kind of criticism we have to address is based on Dennett’s well-knownattack on the intuition that the phenomenal states of a given organism are alwaysdeterminate.11 What is meant here is the idea that, for any given organism, anydescription of that organism’s mental life is at any given moment either true or

false, barring semantic indeterminacies inherent in the description itself. Dennett’spolemic against this “determinacy intuition” (as we shall call it) is fairly complexinsofar as it is constructed out of a number of smaller and bigger points supportingeach other. To a large part, these points merely consist in consolatory effortsintended for those who have difficulties abandoning the intuition: speculations asto how the “illusion” of phenomenological determinacy might have come about,and brief accounts of how one or other interesting phenomenon is dealt with byDennett’s alternative to the common-sense view, i.e., his “Multiple Drafts” theory.Only very few of Dennett’s points against the determinacy intuition stand on theirown feet; and though arguably none of them survive closer scrutiny, it is, I think,worthwhile to spend some time on the most salient of them.

Dennett’s discussion of phenomenological determinacy focusses in large parton two hypotheses of how perceptual and memory processes work together in a

particular psychological situation. These hypotheses mostly serve the purposeof whipping boys; Dennett spends considerable effort ensuring that hardly any-one would want to endorse either of them, which is nicely reflected by the nownotorious names he has given them: ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Stalinesque’, respectively.Thus, Dennett suggests that a defender of the determinacy intuition is forced toembrace either an Orwellian or a Stalinesque account, so that consequently, thedeterminacy intuition ‘inherits’ the unattractiveness of at least one of those twohypotheses. Although the tension between Dennett’s position and our concept of data is rather obvious, I should also note that it is not altogether clear whetherhis argument at all poses a threat for our eventual antiphysicalist argument. Nev-ertheless, his critique of the determinacy intuition has been sufficiently influentialin the recent philosophical climate and is sufficiently effective in obscuring therecipient’s thinking on the matter that it is worth spending some time and effort

on getting rid of that influence. It does not seem that, by adopting the concept of data, we are automatically committed to the determinacy intuition. But neitherdo Dennett’s arguments succeed in showing its falsity.

It will first be necessary to have a closer look at the two hypotheses just men-tioned. Here is how they are introduced in Dennett’s text:

Suppose you are standing on the corner and a long-haired womandashes by. About a second after this, a subterranean memory of someearlier woman—a short-haired woman with eyeglasses—contaminatesthe memory of what you have just seen. [...] An Orwellian revision hashappened: there was a fleeting instant, before the memory contamina-tion took place, when it didn’t seem to you she had glasses. [...] Thisunderstanding of what happened is jeopardized, however, by an alter-

native account. Your subterranean earlier memories of that womanwith the eyeglasses could just as easily have contaminated your expe-rience on the upward path , in the processing of information that occurs“prior to consciousness,”, so that you actually hallucinated the eye-glasses from the very beginning of your experience. In that case, your

11This attack, as well as the following citations, are found in the fifth chapter of Consciousness

Explained (1991).




obsessive memory of the earlier woman with glasses would be playinga Stalinesque trick on you [...]. (p. 117–19)

According to Dennett, there is no fact of the matter which of these accounts isthe correct one, however contrary to our intuitions that may be. He wants to freeus from this intuition, which he thinks keeps us imprisoned in the illusion of a

“Cartesian theater”.A little further below, Dennett illustrates the distinction between Orwellianand Stalinesque accounts in the context of the “color phi phenomenon”, i.e., theillusory perception of movement accompanied by a color change of the supposedlymoving ‘object’. In the experiment Dennett cites (Kolers and von Grunau 1976),subjects were first presented a red spot for a duration of 150 msec. After a 50msec delay, this was followed by a green spot at a different position in the subjects’visual field. Surprisingly, the subjects reported a smooth transition between thetwo stimuli: the red spot seemed to move to the location of the green spot, changingits color in the middle of its movement (the subjects were even able to indicate atwhich position this change in color occurred). It is instructive to see how Dennettridicules the ways in which this phenomenon would be explained by a Stalinesqueor an Orwellian hypothesis:

Consider, first, the hypothesis that there is a Stalinesque mecha-nism: In the brain’s editing room, located before consciousness, thereis a delay, a loop of slack like the tape delay used in broadcasts of “live”programs, which gives the censors in the control room a few secondsto bleep out obscenities before broadcasting the signal. In the editing room , first frame A, of the red spot, arrives, and then, when frameB, of the green spot, arrives, some interstitial frames (C and D) canbe created and then spliced into the film (in the order A,C,D,B) onits way to projection in the theater of consciousness. By the time the“finished product” arrives at consciousness, it already has its illusoryinsertion.

Alternatively, there is the hypothesis that there is an Orwellian

mechanism: shortly after the consciousness of the first spot and thesecond spot (with no illusion of apparent motion at all), a revisionisthistorian of sorts, in the brain’s memory-library receiving station, no-tices that the unvarnished history in this instance doesn’t make enoughsense, so he interprets the brute events, red-followed-by-green, by mak-ing up a narrative about the intervening passage, complete with mid-course color change, and installs this history, incorporating his glosses,frames C and D [...], in the memory library for future reference. (p.120f.)

I think these descriptions are likely to discourage any adherent of the determi-nacy intuition (as well as anyone else) from embracing either of the two accounts.It will therefore be interesting to note that what makes these accounts seem so

ridiculous is not just the fact that they are premised on the assumption of phe-nomenological determinacy. To start with the Orwellian hypothesis, an importantaspect of its apparent ridiculousness lies in what might be called augmentation :on Dennett’s description, an Orwellian account assumes that there is an instancein the brain (the ‘historian’) that is very well aware of what is going on, just asa real-life historian following the political events in a particular society would beaware of these. This is a massive enlargement of the time-scale, and with it goesa massive increase in the quality of understanding of the events in question: the




historian, having ample time to reflect on every piece of information, will noticewhen a revolution erupts; likewise, he will notice when it is beaten down or pe-ters out, where, crucially, ‘to notice’ implies ‘to form a representation of’. Nowcompare this with the situation of the brain (or any of its subsystems). When thesubject is presented with a red spot, the resulting neural firing pattern as early asin the optic nerves can be interpreted as a representation of ‘something red’. But

what should we say when the red spot disappears, as in the experiment Dennettcites, where it ceases to be presented 50 msec before the onset of the green spot?When augmented to a historical scale, a historian might take notice of this eventand accurately form a representation of the following content: “The red, spot-likeobject we have just seen has now disappeared; the visual field contains nothingthat could qualify as a legitimate successor stimulus, i.e., as a stimulus that wouldindicate the presence of the same object, only moved to a different location, orchanged in shape, color, size, or some other aspect of its appearance”. This isnot the kind of representation that one would expect to find on the level of theoptic nerves, nor, for that matter, in the visual cortex. One does not need to bea neuroscientist to know that this kind of awareness takes far longer to build upthan the simple awareness of the presence of ‘something red’.

We see, then, that the apparent unattractiveness of the Orwellian account

stems not so much from the account itself than from Dennett’s description: thesequence of conscious events as implied by Dennett’s metaphor is one of ‘fullawareness of red spot – full awareness of absence of red spot – full awareness of green spot’,12 and this sequence strikes us as implausible with regard to its centralelement, for it seems reasonable to suppose that the short time interval beforethe onset of the green spot gives us no chance of becoming fully conscious of thered spot’s absence. Plausibly, the real sequence of events looks rather more likethis: “full awareness of red spot – beginning awareness of absence of red spot– full awareness of green spot”. That is, our awareness of the fact that the redspot has disappeared is not yet fully built up when it is suddenly thwarted by theperception of the second stimulus. Since this brings a Stalinesque element into anotherwise perfectly Orwellian account, we see not only where Dennett’s metaphormisleads us into taking the Orwellian account for more unattractive than it in factis, but also that our options with respect to explaining the color phi phenomenonare not quite as restricted as Dennett would have us believe.

Apart from this, our reflection on Dennett’s caricature of the “Orwellian” hy-pothesis serves to draw attention to the general point that we should take care notto fall for the Cartesian intuition that awareness necessarily spans, so-to-speak,all levels of abstraction. I mean the following. In the case of the color phi experi-ment, we may suppose that, as the red spot disappeared, so did the awareness of its presence. But, though one would normally (and rightly) infer from this lackof awareness that there is no red spot, this does not entitle us to the assumptionthat the subject is immediately aware of the red spot’s absence. It may very wellbe that this latter awareness takes quite a few milliseconds longer to develop thanit takes the awareness of the spot’s presence to fade. Put in more general terms,

we cannot rule out situations where our mental life exhibits certain features thatwould justify immediate inference to more abstract perceptual beliefs without thesebeliefs actually being entertained .

Our intuition that things are otherwise – to have a name, we might call it the‘abstractive closure intuition’ – is certainly an important aspect of our intuitive,

12For simplicity of exposition, countless details are here left implicit, such as in particular theawareness of the illusory movement of the “spot-like object”, which is created together with theawareness of the green spot.




every-day conception of the mind, but there are also quite familiar, every-daycases where it is known to be mistaken. For example, while we firmly believethat someone who is looking at, say, three blind mice is practically always alsoaware of the ‘threeness’ of what he is looking at, we would have serious doubtsas to whether someone who is visually confronted by a hundred blind mice is alsoaware of their hundredness. Perhaps it is worthwhile to search for and point out

cases where we would not already have expected that intuition to be mistaken.13

But, however valuable such insights may be, their anti-Cartesian thrust should notmake us throw out, with the bath-water of Cartesianism, the perfectly innocentintuition of phenomenological determinacy. This is what I see as the main moraleof our discussion of the Orwellian hypothesis.

Turning now briefly to Dennett’s caricature of the Stalinesque hypothesis, it iseasily seen that here, too, his description contains an element that makes the hy-pothesis look much less attractive than it actually is. This element consists in themetaphor of the movie screen onto which the ‘film of consciousness’ is projected.Since, in the metaphor, the stream of consciousness is nothing else but the lifelongsequence of images projected onto the internal movie screen, it follows that a singleexperience consists simply in the projection of a number of consecutive images (orappropriately selected parts thereof). Consequently, what this suggests for a Stali-

nesque account regarding the nature of experiences is that, just like the projectionof an image onto a movie screen, an experience is an event with extraordinarilywell-defined spatiotemporal boundaries. And this, of course, is grossly implausi-ble. Indeed, it is strange that Dennett should so repeatedly emphasise this point,as there is no motivation whatsoever to believe in a set of ‘magical synapses’ (or a“turnstile of consciousness”, to use Dennett’s phrase) beyond which neural eventsare reflected in consciousness, or that experiences pop into and out of existence

just as swiftly as a signal passes through a myelinated fibre. We do not here needto address the question why exactly there is no such motivation, but one of themore obvious reasons certainly lies in the well-known fact that experiences comein different degrees of intensity. What is more important in this context is thatneither the Stalinesque hypothesis nor the intuition of phenomenological determi-nacy in any way entails that experiences have sharp spatiotemporal boundaries. Ingeneral, a Stalinesque account requires only that experiences are sometimes able tosuppress other experiences; while this suppression may be described as preventingthe other experience “from entering consciousness”, one could just as well say thatsuppressing an experience means to prevent it from becoming more intense. Andalthough the determinacy intuition doubtless requires these “intensity values” (if such there are) to be determinate,14 it is nevertheless clear that it asks for nosharp boundaries of conscious events, be they temporal or spatial.

The general morale we can draw from these remarks is the same as above:However naıve and misleading the metaphor of the “Cartesian theater” may be, itwould be hardly less misleading to ignore the grains of truth contained in it, suchas, in particular, the intuition of phenomenological determinacy.

So far, we have been viewing Dennett’s argument primarily as an ‘argument

13For example, much the same lesson can be drawn from cases of perceptual agnosia (vari-ous forms) as well as from cases of change blindness, inattentional blindness, and perhaps alsomotion blindness. Dennett’s own comments concerning the ‘blind spot’, in the 11th chapter of Consciousness Explained , point into the same direction; cf., however, Pessoa et al. (1998) andShimojo et al. (2001), as well as Noe (2002), from which these references are taken.14We must be careful here not to presuppose absolute intensity values where the actual ontology

perhaps only allows for, say, “more-intense-than” relations between two given experiences. Insuch a case, the determinacy intuition would, of course, only require that those relations bedeterminate – whatever that would mean in the context of the respective ontology.




from caricature’, aimed at discouraging the defender of the determinacy intuitionthrough an unfavourable presentation of the alleged consequences of that view. Of-

ficially , however, his argument rather takes the form of a reductio: the determinacyintuition demands that it is determinate whether a given situation is characterisedby an Orwellian or a Stalinesque account (or, for that matter, by a mixture of the two); but the subject is unable to decide which it is, hence there is no fact

of the matter, hence the determinacy intuition must be false. Dennett’s inferencefrom the subject’s epistemic limitations to there not being “a fact of the matter”is an instance of what he calls his “first-person operationalism”, a position that“brusquely denies the possibility in principle of consciousness of a stimulus in theabsence of the subject’s belief in that consciousness” (p. 132). The tenability of such a position depends strongly on how broadly the concept of ‘belief’ is under-stood. If the notion is construed so broadly that every experience is also viewedas a sort of belief about its own occurrence, then Dennett’s “first-person opera-tionalism” will trivially turn out to be correct. On the other hand, it is obviousthat his concept of ‘belief’ is much narrower than this and lies much closer to thatend of the conceptual spectrum where having a belief practically always entailsits reportability by the person who has it. On such an understanding of ‘belief’,however, it is highly questionable that every experience should entail the existence

of a belief about its occurrence.15

According to Dennett, the assumption of an appearance/reality distinction “atthe heart of human subjectivity” is “metaphysically dubious, because it creates thebizarre category of the objectively subjective—the way things actually, objectivelyseem to you even if they don’t seem to seem that way to you!” (ibid.) He forgetsthat that distinction is, in all the cases he discusses, a distinction between realityand appearance in hindsight . There is nothing dubious at all, metaphysically orotherwise, about the supposition that we can be mistaken about the way thingshave seemed to us a moment ago, for the same reason as there is nothing dubiousabout the fact that our memories are not always reliable.

In defense of Dennett’s position, it must be said that to a physicalist who –reasonably enough – regards consciousness as explainable on the basis of “cere-bral celebrity” (where this notion is equally reasonably operationalised as causalinfluence on behavioural output), Dennett’s scepticism about phenomenologicaldeterminacy might make perfectly good sense. For, if consciousness indeed re-quires nothing else than a representation’s causal influence on behavioural output,the problem arises of what we should say to cases where a relevant causal chainof neurological events starts but is unnaturally interrupted (for example, by neu-rosurgical intervention), just before it gets to trigger any behaviour or becomesstored in memory. Suppose that, if such a chain had not been interrupted, itwould have corresponded to a phenomenal experience of a kind K . The questionis, was there a K -experience immediately before the causal chain was interrupted,or not?16 I agree that such cases are puzzling and might lead one to a scepticismabout phenomenological determinacy – but only insofar as one subscribes to thesaid kind of physicalism . An anti -physicalist would obviously not be committed

to a reduction of consciousness in terms of behavioural relevance, so he need notnecessarily be worried by interrupted causal chains. And, since the position takenin this thesis is essentially antiphysicalist as well, neither need we.

15For a related discussion of Dennett’s arguments, see Carman (2005). Christopher Peacocke’s(1989) considerations on ‘perceptual content’ may also serve as a basis from which to attackDennett’s position.16For a discussion of this problem by Dennett himself, see Dennett (2001).




2.3 The Concepts of ‘I’ and Accessibility

We have introduced the concept of data as a subjective concept, denoting thetruths for which one has immediate and unconditional warrant. Since that conceptis to be our conceptual starting-point, its introduction had to be rather informal,in part by way of example, in part through the use of concepts that we strictly

speaking ‘do not yet have’, since we want to derive them from that of data ratherthan vice versa. These concepts, of course, are those of ‘I’ and of subjectivity.The former we have used quite freely in explanations of what is and what is notmeant by ‘data’; and the latter, even though it may not occur explicitly, does soimplicitly, e.g. where the concept of ‘data’ is characterised as a subjective one.

The concepts we have to introduce next are those of ‘I’ and ‘accessibility’.Since the concept of ‘subjectivity’ that we are after in this section does not belongto the notion of empirical subjectivity, the concept of ‘I’ to be introduced now is,correspondingly, not the common, empirical concept of ‘I’ either. That is, it is notthe concept one would have in mind when one refers to oneself in the first personsingular more or less as the thinker of one’s thoughts and/or the agent of one’sacts (which we will therefore also call the ‘empirical self-concept’). It is differentfrom this, although it might eventually turn out that it coincides with a concept

of empirical subjectivity.When I say the concept of ‘I’ is going to be derived from that of ‘data’, the

term ‘derived’ should be understood in a very loose sense. What is meant is onlythat the concept of ‘I’ constitutes a solution to a problem which could not beformulated without making use of the concept of ‘data’. The problem, however,does not arise from the concept of ‘data’, but rather from the data themselves,what they are and what they are not. For, though all data are truths, it caneasily be seen that they do not make up all the truths. There are some truths,e.g. arithmetical ones, that are not data at all. The problem, then, is this: What exactly distinguishes data from other truths?

It is not very hard to come up with an idea of how a solution to this problemmight look like. Given our experience as organisms perceiving and acting in ourenvironment, the obvious solution seems to be – in its roughest outline – this: The

data are those truths that stand in a certain relation to a certain entity. We willcall the relation ‘accessibility ’; and it would seem only logical to call the entity‘I ’. But how is this entity different from others? One might perhaps say thatthe concept of ‘I’ is simply an indexical expression, referring to different entitiesas it occurs in different contexts. This is indeed the result we will end up withfurther below, but I propose to approach this position in smaller steps. Let usbegin with the conceptually simpler view that the concept of ‘I’ corresponds toa unary predicate, in the same way as the concept ‘the stars’ corresponds to theunary predicate ‘is a star’. Since a unary predicate can normally be instantiatedby more than one entity, we should accordingly be more open about the numberof entities denoted by ‘I’, and rephrase the outline of our above solution as follows:The data are those truths that stand in a certain relation to a certain kind of entity. Or, using the terms just introduced: The data are those truths that areaccessible to one or more entities denoted by ‘I’. We will modify this account inthe next section. In the meanwhile, it should be kept in mind that, by acceptingthis outline of a solution to the problem of distinguishing data from other truths,we do not yet have a very clear idea of what entity or entities are denoted by‘I’, nor what exactly the relation of accessibility comes to. The proposal merelyconsists in postulating a property and a relation in order to account for the factthat the data do not cover all the truths. The metaphysics of that property and




of that relation is thereby far from settled.To say this may seem somewhat odd, as it does not mesh very well with talk

of “our experience as organisms perceiving and acting in our environment”, whichapparently already presupposes that “we” are organisms. Identifying the newconcept of ‘I’ with this rhetorical ‘we’, it would seem to follow that ‘I’ denotes anorganism (and a single one at that). But this confusion can simply be attributed

to a certain looseness of expression. Translated into more precise (though less fa-miliar) language, the phrase, “our experience as such-and-such organisms”, wouldread as: “the data, which are centred on such-and-such an organism”. That thedata are ‘centred’ on an organism should not be understood as saying that they are‘accessible’ to an organism. ‘Centredness’ is here meant as a rather innocent andsomewhat vague notion, hardly more sophisticated than ‘having to do with’. Thedata are centred on an organism because, in some way or other, they all pertainto it. This is not to say that a concept referring to that organism has to be aconstituent of each datum (as if they were to be rendered in the form P (o), whereo denotes the organism). Rather, the data may also be centred on an organism inan implicit way, so-to-speak, which only requires that the organism be involved inthe states of affairs encoded in the data.

It will probably be clear that the concept of centredness, when understood in

this sense, cannot have the same semantics as the concept of accessibility – afterall, by far not every fact involving my organism is reflected in a datum (take, e.g.,the fact that my organism contains so-and-so many milligrams of magnesium).But even disregarding this, the two concepts ought to be sharply distinguishedfrom each other. For, whereas the concept of accessibility is explicitly introducedas part of the solution of the above problem and therefore opaque (since we donot know beforehand what the solution will look like in detail), the concept of centredness is relatively transparent and bears no problem-solving responsibilitywhatsoever.

Roughly the same applies to the relation between the empirical self-conceptand the concept of ‘I’ introduced in this section. The latter, just like the conceptof accessibility, is introduced in order to solve a certain problem. The empiricalself-concept, by contrast, is there to denote the bearer of my mental activities, thething that thinks, feels, perceives and wills. As such, this concept will most likelydenote (part of ) my organism. And, although it might in the end turn out thatthere is no better solution to the said problem than one according to which theconcept of ‘I’ introduced here denotes the same thing as the empirical self-concept,the fact that it might theoretically well be otherwise is enough to necessitate thatthe two concepts be cleanly kept separate from each other.

Now that the contrast between the empirical and the new concept of ‘I’ is clear,the solution (or solution-schema) to the above problem of which this concept ismeant to be a part may appear somewhat dubious. After all, that the data aredistinguished from other truths by way of their special relation to some specialentity or entities called ‘I’ is fairly obviously an idea inspired by the commonempirical self-concept. So, with what right do I suppose that the correct solution

to the problem of how data are distinguished from other truths can be modelledon a concept whose purpose (if there is a purpose to it at all) lies in completelydifferent areas? This is the question we will now turn to.




2.4 Why Accessibility?

The problem for which the introduction of the concepts of ‘I’ and accessibility issupposed to be a solution is that of giving an account for the fact that the data donot comprise all the truths. Since the concept of data is, at core, not an artificialone, this problem is entirely real and the solutions proposed to it will necessarily

have metaphysical significance. If, for example, a predicate is postulated to solvethis problem (as above the binary predicate ‘accessible to’), then this means thatthis predicate expresses something about the ‘real nature’ of things, or, to put itnegatively: this predicate will then not be a mere ‘Cambridge’ predicate, whoseextension is given merely as a set of entities (or tuples of entities) to which it can,by definition, correctly be applied. For this reason, accessibility must be a ‘real’(i.e., non-Cambridge) relation, and the entities denoted by ‘I’ must be ‘real’ (i.e.,not abstract) entities.

Now, the question we are facing is why the problem of distinguishing data fromother truths is best solved in the way proposed. Because of the metaphysical sig-nificance of this problem and hence our solutions to it, the principle of ontologicalparsimony is in force and directs us to favour the parsimonious solutions over themore expensive ones. A reasonable course of the argument will therefore start

with the metaphysically simplest kind of solution: the ‘unary-predicate’ approach,which postulates only one metaphysical predicate, and in fact, only a unary one.That approach will then be contrasted with our present proposal in terms of ‘I’and accessibility. It will emerge that this proposal, when properly interpreted, canbe expected to be strongly superior to the unary-predicate approach, even thoughit is for the most part unclear how metaphysically expensive it will turn out to be.

To get a clearer idea of what a unary-predicate account would look like, let usconstruct a more concrete hypothesis. An account of the difference between dataand other truths is a ‘unary-predicate account’ if it is based on one unary meta-physical predicate. It may at first seem puzzling how such an account could becoherently realised, since truths are very abstract entities and thus do not instanti-ate any metaphysical predicates. Nevertheless, there are, of course, some relationsbetween truths and the realm of metaphysics. For instance, there is the relation

of representation , as we find it between linguistic utterances and propositions. Be-cause of the complex and subjective nature of representation, however – arguably,X represents Y never in an absolute sense, but always for some representationalsystem Z –, this is not a very good relation to base one’s metaphysic on. A muchmore likely candidate (indeed, the only one I can think of) is the relation betweentruths and the entities involved in them, in the sense that, e.g., the truth that ‘thisapple exists’ involves this apple. A unary-predicate account would thus have to bebased not only on the unary predicate it postulates, but also on such a relation;for example, if P is the predicate it postulates, it could analyse ‘the data’ as thosetruths that involve some entitiy instantiating P .

Since only very few truths are data (in comparison to how many truths thereare in total, no matter how they are counted), the account would have to make surethat P is only instantiated in a very small number of cases. Indeed, if there is any‘theme’ (so-to-speak) uniting the data and setting them apart from other truths, itwould seem to be the fact that they centre around this particular organism – andnot even all of the truths about this organism can properly be called ‘data’. So, if they were to be captured individually, it seems that their individual descriptionswould have to figure in the clauses of the resulting theory. And if they couldbe captured by the organism they centre on, then at least a fully individuatingdescription of this organism would have to occur in that theory. This might be




better than the former case, as there would then be only one description of anindividual entity, but it will probably be clear that the result would in any casebe far from satisfying. When written out, the theory would consist practicallyexclusively of the description of either the data or of (some part or ‘aspect’ of)this organism, and would be exceedingly long. The longer it is, however, the moreinelegant, and the less attractive it would seem to be.

How, then, does our present proposal, formulated in the previous section, farein terms of ontological parsimony? Not badly, I’d like to claim, provided theproposal is understood such that the concept of data is relativised to the contextof its evaluation. Let us first clarify what this means.

The basic idea is quite straightforward. In fact, it will already be familiar fromthe theory of indexical expressions such as ‘I’ (the natural language pronoun, notthe concept introduced in the previous section), ‘here’, and ‘now’. For, that anexpression (or a concept; there is not much of a relevant difference for our presentpurposes) is relativised means essentially nothing else than that it has differentextensions when used in different contexts. Thus, the indexical expression ‘here’,for example, is such a relativised expression, as it will (usually) denote differentplaces when uttered by different speakers. And similarly, to say that the conceptof data is relativised means first and foremost that ‘the set of all data’ denotes

different sets of truths depending on the entity in whose context the concept isevaluated.17

But why should a relativisation of the concept of data allow for a more ele-gant metaphysical theory? Again, the reason is simple: if the concept of data isrelativised and has therefore different extensions in different contexts, then theconcept of ‘I’, whose task it is to denote those entities by accessibility to whichthe data are distinguished from other truths, will evidently also have to denotedifferent things in different contexts, and thus to be relativised as well. This allowsthe concept of ‘I’ to be metaphysically undemanding : it can fulfill its task withoutrequiring the introduction of any new metaphysical predicate. In particular, aswe will see below (sect. 3.1), it can simply refer to whatever entity constitues therespective context. One could say that, in terms of ontological parsimony, theepistemological self-concept ‘comes for free’.18

This leaves only the concept of accessibility to worry about. Unfortunately, itis at this point completely unclear how metaphysically demanding this concept is.For all we can say at this point, accessibility could yet turn out to be identifiablewith an analytical relation between truths and other entities, such as the involve-ment relation mentioned above. If something like that should be the best theoryon the metaphysics of data available, our antiphysicalist project would of coursebe doomed, for then, the concept of accessibility would trivially have a place in

17Regarding the locution “entity in whose context...”, it will be made more explicit in sect. 2.5how every semantical context is constituted by (or ‘tied’ to) a specific entity.18It may not be completely correct to say that it is “evident” that the concept of ‘I’ must be

relativised if the concept of data is. It might also be thought possible to relativise the conceptof accessibility instead and leave that of ‘I’ unrelativised. But how implausible a suggestion thiswould be. For one thing, to relativise a concept with respect to context of evaluation requires a

plausible function from contexts to extensions. Since ‘I’ is an entity-concept (as we may call aconcept denoting one or more entities), and since contexts are ‘tied’ to entities (as we will see inthe next section), there is an obvious candidate for such a function in the case of a relativisationof ‘I’: simply the function that maps a context to the entity to which it is ‘tied’. In the caseof a relativisation of ‘accessibility’, by contrast, we are dealing with a ‘relation-concept’, whoseextension can only be a relation, and we would accordingly need a function from contexts torelations. The only remotely plausible functions I can think of, however, are constant; and aconstant function would mean that the extension of ‘accessibility’ does not change across contexts,which, of course, would defeat the purpose of relativisation.




any ontology whatsoever. But it could also turn out that accessibility is basedon some binary or ternary or higher-arity metaphysical relation so far unknownto physicists (which would at least entail property dualism), or perhaps that thisrelation is known but only in an incomplete way (which would still be compat-ible with mere revisionism). We do not know. We can , however, be reasonablysure that this approach will not lead to such absurdly inelegant theories as the

unary-predicate approach. For there is no good reason why accessibility should beinstantiated only by a select few truths and entities. Because the data are anal-ysed as only those truths that are accessible to the entity (or entities) denoted by‘I’, nothing prevents us from assuming that all kinds of other truths are accessibleto all kinds of other entities. And less specific restrictions mean shorter and thusmore elegant theories.

Of course, discounting the unary-predicate approach does not leave our pro-posal as the only remaining alternative. But since the metaphysics of the ac-cessibility relation is not yet settled, we cannot very well compare it with otherapproaches in terms of ontological simplicity. This was different for the unary-predicate approach only because of its inability to allow for the relativisation of the concept of data, which resulted in an absurd lack of elegance. The only kindof comparison left to us is therefore not ontological, but conceptual elegance. But

it would lead too far here to construct potential alternative approaches and tocompare their conceptual elegance with that of our present proposal. I think thecanonical character of the latter will become apparent at the latest when we con-sider the problem of how to account for the fact that the data centre on just atiny fraction of the universe, in sect. 3.5.

We have seen above that the elegance and corresponding attractiveness of ourproposal crucially depends on the relativisation of the concepts of data and ‘I’ tothe contexts of their evaluation. So far, however, there has been no argument yetas to what this relativisation is supposed to look like. To tackle this question, wefirst need to develop a clearer conception of what is meant by ‘context’.

2.5 Contexts of Evaluation

When approaching the concept of subjectivity, we need at least a rudimentaryframework in which to talk about possibilities and contexts of concept evaluation.A very powerful and popular such framework is that of Two-Dimensional Seman-tics.19 We will here sketch something similar to the traditional Kaplanian versionof this framework, adapted to the purpose of theorising about subjectivity.

Those familiar with Kaplan’s version of Two-Dimensional Semantics will knowthat he uses it for the treatment of indexicals and demonstratives, and that oneof the ‘dimensions’ of his framework is formed by a large set of ‘contexts of occur-rence’. The same will be true in our case, except that we will instead mostly talk of ‘contexts of evaluation’. The reason for the introduction of ‘contexts of occurrence’is simply that certain expressions, such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’ etc., have different exten-sions when evaluated with respect to different situations (e.g., different speakers),

whereas others (such as ‘the number 5’) have the same extension regardless of the situation in which they occur. This might lead one to the idea of identifiyingcontexts with possible situations, and indeed, in all versions of Two-DimensionalSemantics I am aware of, this is essentially what has been done. However, we willnot follow this tradition, for reasons that will soon become obvious.

19E.g., see Kaplan (1989), Stalnaker (1978), or Chalmers (forthcoming).




Before we specify what contexts of evaluation will be in our framework, let usintroduce the second ‘dimension’. In a similar fashion to all other versions of Two-Dimensional Semantics I am aware of, this dimension consists in a set of possibleworlds. The sense of ‘possible’ in which I will say that such worlds are possibleworlds is the sense in which the term is today mostly understood. The kind of possibility to which it refers has been introduced by Kripke (1971) and also by

him been given the name of ‘metaphysical possibility’. I should note that thereis yet another important kind of possibility, namely, epistemic possibility. Thelatter could be incorporated into our framework by adding a third dimension toit (which would be useful for the solution of “Frege’s puzzle”), but for the presentpurposes, the two dimensions introduced so far will be enough.

Let us now consider more closely the elements of the first dimension, namely,the contexts of evaluation.20 Briefly put, we will conceive of them as abstractentities ‘tied’ to other entities by which they are fully individuated; and these latterentities have to be actual . Or in other words: every actual entity ‘constitutes’ acorresponding context of evaluation. With respect to this, two brief clarificatoryremarks:

1. ‘Actual’ means: being either an element of the actual world, or a ‘world-

less’ entity, i.e., not an element of any possible world at all. Good examplesfor worldless entities are numbers (barring mathematical Platonism). Putinformally, an entity is worldless just in case it can be brought into ‘exis-tence’ simply by defining it, independently of any contingent facts, where,by ‘contingent’, I mean everything that is not logically necessary.

2. The predicate ‘tied to’ should not be seen as having any significance beyondwhat is implied by the way in which it is being used here. It merely refersto an abstract one-to-one relation between a certain sort of abstract entities(namely, the contexts) and other entities. The purpose of this predicate liesin nothing else than the individuation of contexts of evaluation.

That contexts are here analysed in this way and not as ‘possible situations’ or‘parameter assignments’ constitutes a significant deviation from most traditionalaccounts. It is not my task here to give a detailed defence of this deviation, and itis not necessary to prove its superiority over every competing framework, since itis only meant as a device for expressing certain truths (or falsehoods, as the casemay be). Still, however, it is probably appropriate to give some hints as to whatthe motivation for the said deviation consists in. First of all, we will let contexts befully individuated by their ‘being tied’ to other entities, because this reflects thesituation we are normally faced with when interpreting an utterance of naturallanguage: there will be some speaker, and this speaker provides the context inrelation to which we have to interpret the utterance. For a basic example, if thespeaker utters ‘here’ (under appropriate circumstances), we will look where thespeaker is located in order to find the place referred to by that utterance.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, we will not allow entities from other

possible worlds to play the role of ‘bearers’ of contexts. In point of conceptualtidyness, this entails the obvious advantage that the two dimensions – contexts onthe one hand, possible worlds on the other – are cleanly kept separate from eachother. There are still other reasons, having to do with the concept of ‘indexicalpossibility’, but to those, we will come further below.

20There will be little need for us also to deal with possible worlds, although I might notethat, where they will in the following be mentioned, what is meant are, very roughly, alternative

histories of the universe (where ‘alternative’ is of course not meant to exclude the actual history).




It might at first seem strange why we should associate a context of evaluationwith every entity and not just with bona fide speakers (or ‘time-slices’ of speakers),but on closer reflection, it should quickly become clear that this would be quite anunreasonable restriction. Semantic rules tell us what an expression means whenuttered in a certain context, but they are hardly concerned with whether anythingis, in fact, uttered or not.21 Taking again the number 5 as an example, it is clear

that this number could never utter anything at all. Still, it makes perfect sense(and is correct) to say that the expression ‘my arithmetic successor’, in the contextof that number, refers to the number 6.

21This holds even in cases where the expression is something like ‘this utterance’. That thisexpression does not have a referent unless it is actually uttered is evidently not itself a semanticalrule, but only a consequence of such rules. Cf. Kaplan (1989, sect. XIII).

I should perhaps also note that this talk of ‘semantical rules’ must to a certain degree be seenas an idealisation, albeit a harmless one.



Chapter 3

Subjectivity

I do not yet have a sufficient understanding of what this

“I” is, that now necessarily exists. So I must be on my

guard against carelessly taking something else to be this

“I,” and so making a mistake in the very item of knowl-

edge that I maintain is the most certain and evident of all.

– Descartes, Second Meditation 1

Having in the previous chapter introduced several concepts that serve as thebasis on which to define the epistemological concept of subjectivity, we are nowready to tackle that task itself.

3.1 The Epistemological Concept of Subjectivity

We left section 2.4 with the question of what the relativisation of the concept of data to its context of evaluation should look like. A convenient way to approach

this question is to ask what the relation would have to be that holds between agiven context and those things that are in that context denoted by ‘data’. It isuseful in this connection to recall our hypothesis on the distinction between thedata and other truths. We proposed the view that the data are those truths thatstand in a certain kind of relation, which we called ‘accessibility’, to a certain entityor entities, for which we introduced the term ‘I’. Even though the metaphysics of these entities or of the accessibility relation has in no way been fixed yet, thishypothesis must nevertheless be seen as a conjecture on the ‘essence’ of what it isto be a datum, just like the hypothesis that water is liquid H2O is a conjecture onthe ‘essence’ of water. Just like something counts as water if and only it is liquidH2O, so – provided our hypothesis is correct – something will rightly be called adatum just in case it is accessible to whatever is denoted by ‘I’. However, unlike‘water’, the concept of data has to be relativised to contexts of evaluation, in order

to avoid the absurdity of the unary-predicate approach (sect. 2.4 above); and thisstep in turn necessitated a relativisation also of the concept of ‘I’. It follows, then,that the expression ‘the set of all data’, when evaluated in a given context, refersto the set of all truths that are accessible to what in that context is denoted by‘I’. So, in analogy to above, we have to ask what the relation looks like that holdsbetween a given context and what ‘I’ refers to in that context. And here, there can

1Translation by Cuttingham et al. (1984–85).

41



CHAPTER 3. SUBJECTIVITY 42

be only one sensible answer: ‘I’ refers in every context to the very entity by whichthat context is constituted. Every other answer would be completely arbitraryand introduce into the essence of ‘data’ a foreign element for which there wouldbe no motivation whatsoever.2

This is not without interesting consequences. First of all, since our technicalterm ‘I’ now refers in every context to the very entity to which that context is tied,

it is not a sortal term anymore, and we are finally doing justice to the fact thatit is originally the pronoun of the first person singular , as well as, of course, anindexical expression. For this reason, we will now start to use it in the traditionalway, including all the derivatives (‘me’, ‘myself’, ‘my’, ‘mine’ etc.). The ambiguityresulting from the fact that the empirical subject can be referred to in the sameway will be resolved either implicitly by the context, or explicitly.

Furthermore, there is the question of the context of evaluation. As we shouldnot prematurely let our concept of ‘I’ coincide with the empirical self-concept(which would beg the question in favour of physicalism), it follows from the abovethat the context in which the concepts of ‘I’ and data are used is not necessarilythe context of the empirical subject. Rather, it will have to be the context of theentity denoted by ‘I’ itself (in other words, my context), regardless of whether thisentity coincides with the empirical subject. Now, this may seem strange. After

all, it is the empirical subject (my ‘cognitive system’) that operates with theseconcepts. Does it not follow, then, that it must also be the empirical subject inwhose context they are to be evaluated? This may be a natural way of reasoning,but it is fallacious none the less. There is no good reason to suppose that a system’soperating on a given concept poses any restrictions on the contexts in which thatconcept can be evaluated. For example, take the concept ‘my arithmetic successor’.We know that, if evaluated in the context of the number 5, it denotes the number6, and we know this because we can operate on that concept. Yet, even though weoperate on it, this patently entails no restriction with respect to the contexts inwhich it can be evaluated. And why should not a similar independence between‘processing site’ and context of evaluation be possible in the case of ‘I’? Nor is it atall relevant that the empirical subject is the ‘origin’ of the concepts of data and ‘I’.Since, however, the picture being drawn here is admittedly somewhat unfamiliar,I will try to make it more palatable in the next section (i.e., sect. 3.1.4).

3.1.1 Defining ‘Subjectivity’

The topic of this section is the concept of subjectivity, for which I propose thefollowing simple definition:

(S) Subjectivity is the property of being a potential first relatum of the accessi-bility relation.

Or, in other words: something is a subject if and only if it is a potential firstrelatum of the accessibility relation. What is this supposed to mean?

First, it needs to be clarified what is meant by a ‘first relatum of the accessibility

relation’. This relation is, of course, a binary one, so that every instantiation of it involves two relata. Since the relation is moreover not symmetrical, we needa way of differentiating between its relata, and I would like to do this by givingthem numbers, so that one is called the ‘first relatum’ and the other the ‘second

2This is not quite correct; there is still one alternative referent that would not be arbitrary,namely, the context itself . But this would obviously be a very odd choice, since contexts aremerely abstract entities introduced for the purposes of semantic discourse, where they serve asconvenient proxies for the entities by which they are constituted.




relatum’, as follows: if x is accessible to y, y is in this instance to be consideredthe first relatum and x the second. This way of counting may be counter-intuitiveat first (because it goes against the grammatical order of the relata), but in thelong run, it seems to be more convenient to think about it in this way.

Second, we have to specify what it means for an entity to be a potential nthrelatum of a certain relation. The idea is this. It has already been pointed out

that, at least in metaphysical reasoning if not in pure logic, there is more to arelation than just a set of tuples. So, if we say that x is related to y by therelation R, then this should not only be understood as saying that the pair (x, y)is an element of the set-theoretic interpretation of R, but, insofar as our talkabout x and y is ‘grounded’ in reality, it should also be understood as an assertionabout how x is related to y, i.e., as an assertion about the relative nature of xand y. Acknowledgment of this goes hand in hand with recognition of the factthat for some entities, it “does not make sense” to talk of them as being relatedin a certain way to something else. So, for example, one would normally thinkthat it would not make sense to say that the number 5 likes cats. This is becausesome relations impose certain non-relational conditions on their relata, violationof which logically entails non-instantiation of the relation itself (that is, with thespecified relatum). In this case, one of the constraints on being a first relatum of

the relation of liking is that of being a sentient being, which is, clearly enough,not satisfied by the number 5. It is this kind of non-satisfaction which, I think,leads us to say that it would not “make sense” to talk of things being liked (or,for that matter, not liked) by the number 5. Hence, the “potential first relata of the accessibility relation” are those entities that satisfy the conditions that thisrelation imposes on its first relata.

3.1.2 Intuitions, and the Concept of Consciousness

To see why ‘subjectivity’ should be defined in the way proposed, we have to goback to our intuitive concept of subjectivity. The concept I mean is the one thatcomes to bear in our talk about “what I might have been instead”, i.e, in considera-tions of alternative identities. We have examples of such considerations in Thomas

Nagel’s wonderings of what it is like to be a bat (1974), in Geoffrey Madell’s sup-position that he might have been the son of Elizabeth I of England (1981, ch. 4),and also in Zeno Vendler’s exercises in ‘transference’ (1984, ch. 1,2). Arguably,it is this concept that is at play when David Chalmers defines the difference be-tween zombies and ‘normal’ people (1996, ch. 3), and in various related talk (beit by Chalmers or other authors) about ‘experiences’, ‘mental life’, ‘first-personperspective’, ‘phenomenal consciousness’ etc., when applied to other cases thanone’s own.3 Finally, the concept is implicitly present whenever people talk about‘observers’, even though the context in which one does so (e.g., verificationism) istraditionally conceived of as lying outside of the philosphy of mind.

These latter (implicit) occurrences of the concept of subjectivity, however,do not seem especially fruitful for an analysis of that concept. In every casewhere we are asked to think of the experiences or mental lives or the phenomenalconsciousness etc. of other beings, it is practically presupposed that we alreadyknow what it means to say that something else has experiences, a mental life,and so on, and these locutions do little to elucidate each other. Fortunately, thesituation seems to be somewhat different in the former cases, where talk of otherminds is primarily rooted in counterfactual considerations of “what I might have

3In one’s own case, the ‘substitution concept’ I am using is that of ‘data’ or, derivatively,those of ‘I’ and ‘accessibility’. See above, p. 25.




been”. Putting matters this way brings in the concept of possibility , and this, atlast, allows us (or so it seems) to furnish an informative analysis of the conceptof subjectivity. In particular, it promises an analysis of ‘subjectivity’ on the dualbasis of the concepts of data and possibility.

It is, I think, not implausible to translate the locution, ‘I could have beensomething else’ as ‘The data could have been different’. For, if I were for example

Napoleon at the battle of Austerlitz, then surely, the truths that I had to identifyas data (were I familiar with the concept) would be quite different from whatthey actually are; and conversely, if the data were such that they centre in theappropriate way on Napoleon as he oversees his victorious troops, thinks of MariaWalewska etc., I were certainly justified in concluding that I am Napoleon.4 Forthis reason, it seems that we could base our analysis of subjectivity on the conceptof possible data , and thus define ‘subjectivity’ as referring to the property of beingan entity such that it is possible that the truths accessible to it constitute the setof all data . Defining subjectivity in this way seems to be a fairly intuitive way inwhich to arrive at that notion (where we may leave it open for the moment whetherthe definiendum here is really the same as that of the above definition). There are,however, problems with such an approach. In the epistemic sense of ‘possible’, thedata could for a large part be no other truths than what they actually are (since

we are presupposing that the data I know of form at least an important part of thetotal data); and in the metaphysical sense of ‘possible’, a set of truths counts as a‘possible set of data’ only if its elements would in another history of the universehave been accessible to the entity actually denoted by ‘I’ (or in other words, tome). Since we know nothing so far about the metaphysics of this latter entity, wecannot know whether any truths centering on Napoleon at Austerlitz might indeedhave been accessible to it. For all we know, it could have come into existence meredecades ago, perhaps even together with the organism that is writing this.

So, we see that it can be neither epistemic nor metaphysical possibility thatone has in mind when one utters a sentence like ‘I might have been Napoleon atAusterlitz’, being fully convinced of its truth. As far as I can see, there is onlyone other sense of possibility, which, however, has yet to be constructed; I willcall it ‘indexical possibility’. Just like metaphysical possibility corresponds to thesecond dimension of our semantic framework (and just like epistemic possibilitywould correspond to the third dimension), this new kind of possibility analogouslybelongs to the first dimension of our framework, i.e., the one concerned withcontexts of evaluation. A proposition is considered possible in this sense just incase it is defined and true in an actual context. For example, ‘I am on the moon’is indexically possible, because there are entities (dust particles for instance) thatare, in fact, on the moon. ‘I am standing on the moon’ is also indexically possible,because we are understanding the actual world in the sense of the actual history ,and it is a well-known fact that there have been people standing on the moon.‘I am watering chrysanthemums on the moon’, on the other hand, may very wellbe indexically im possible, since, for all we know, it may be that the world willnever see such a thing as a lunar garden.5 As for Napoleon at Austerlitz, it will

be clear, then, that it is in the indexical sense possible that I am him, overlookingmy troops and (perhaps) thinking of poor Maria Walewska.Even though this ‘indexical possibility’ had yet to be defined, it is, I think, not

at all too artificial a concept to underlie the apparently ‘counter-factual’ statementshere considered. Of course, not in such a way that one is conscious of all the

4The example, of course, is taken from Bernard Williams’ famous paper, Imagination and the

Self .5But beware of parallel universes.




apparatus that goes with it. But, allowing for a certain amount of idealisation,I do not see why the concept of ‘indexical possibility’ should not do a very good

job of capturing the sense of possibility involved when we say such things as “Imight have been Napoleon”, etc. At the very least, it does fit the known facts:for every actual context, tied to an entity x, one can say “I might have been x”in apparently just the same sense as one can say “I might have been Napoleon”;

and for every non-actual context, such as the context of the Chief Lunar Gardenermight be, we are not inclined to say that we might have been the entity to whichthat context is tied.

However, there is an objection: What, for example, about the number 5? Wehave already said in the previous section that (being a ‘worldless entity’) thenumber 5 constitutes an actual context, but we are certainly little inclined tosay something like ‘I might have been the number 5’. Does this not falsify ourassumption that the kind of possibility here at play is indexical possibility? Theanswer is: no. It has already been pointed out that those statements about whatone might have been are best viewed as statements about what the data mighthave been. Also recall that the data are, in every context, those truths that areaccessible to me (in that context). But since accessibility is a metaphysical relationand the number 5 a worldless entity, the latter is clearly not even a potential first

relatum of the accessibility relation. Furthermore, it is not uncommon to regarda concept as undefined in the context of an entity if this entity does not qualifyas a relatum of the relation underlying that concept. To see this, consider someexamples. If a competent speaker of English is asked how many moons the number5 has got, the answer will probably not be ‘zero’, but much more likely somethingalong the lines of ‘not applicable’, indicating that the concept ‘my number of moons’ is undefined in the context of a number. Neither can he be expected togive his unqualified assent to such statements as ‘Alpha Centauri never sleeps’or ‘The annual income of

√2 equals $0.00’, even though he knows perfectly well

that the negations of these sentences are not true. The underlying relations inthese three cases are: ‘x has y as a moon’, ‘x sleeps at point-of-time y’, and ‘xearns y’. They all impose certain non-relational conditions on their first relata, sothat whatever does not satisfy them (not being a planet, a living being, or a legalperson) cannot be a first relatum of the respective relation. After a little reflection,it does seem that one feels uneasy about assigning an extension to a concept ina given context whenever the entity to which that context is tied fails to satisfythe appropriate non-relational conditions imposed by those relations.6 Thus, theconcept of ‘data’ will likely also be regarded as undefined in the context of thenumber 5, from which it follows that the proposition ‘I am the number 5’, takenas equivalent to ‘The data are those truths that are accessible to the number 5’, ismeaningless and therefore not indexically possible in the sense specified above. I donot wish to take a stance on the question of whether this entails that the sentence ‘Imight have been the number 5’ is also meaningless, or whether the modal operatorimplicit in the “might” has some ‘redeeming power’ in this respect. What had tobe accounted for was merely our intuitive reluctance to agree with the former kind

of sentence.This may suffice to establish indexical possibility as the most plausible modalityto underlie our talk of what we “might have been”. However, the last paragraphalso raises serious doubt as to whether we can base our concept of subjectivityon the notion of “what I might have been”, in particular if that concept is in

6Although I am in these examples concerned only with cases where there is an ‘underlyingrelation’ involved, I do of course not presuppose that these are the only cases to give rise to anuneasiness about the applicability of certain concepts.




turn supposed to be the central concept of our argument against physicalism. For,although it may be natural to regard ‘data’ as undefined in the context of anentity that is no potential relatum of accessibility, this is still essentially a matterof convention. Just as well, we could say that the concept of data is defined inevery context (even that of the number 5). The extension of ‘the set of all data’would, in these contexts, be the empty set, but that is also the case in the contexts

of those potential relata of the accessibility relation that are not also actual relata,i.e., to which no truths are accessible.

On the other hand, we cannot simply assume that “what I might have been”extends to all entities full stop. It is preposterous to say that ‘I might have beenthe number 5’, perhaps more so than it seems natural to regard ‘data’ as undefinedin such contexts. But what makes it so preposterous, then? To this, I know onlyone answer: When we talk of ‘what we might have been’, this phrase must beinterpreted as ‘what subjects we might have been’, taking recourse to the intuitivenotion of subjectivity adumbrated above. On the assumption that subjectivityis a metaphysical property, it is, then, practically analytical that the assertion ‘Imight have been the number 5’ is false. However, if this way of interpreting ourtalk of ‘what we might have been’ is correct – and I think it must be –, thenit would clearly be circular to base a definition of ‘subjectivity’ on the notion of

possible data, for it is the intuitive notion of subjectivity that our definition (S)is supposed to capture. It appears, then, that we have ruled out what seemed tobe a promising alternative to that first proposal: ‘what I might have been’ can nolonger be seen as providing a basis on which to define ‘subjectivity’. The task stillremains to give some positive reasons for adopting (S) instead.

We have already seen one such reason only a few paragraphs ago, where wesaid that it was natural to regard ‘data’ as undefined in the context of anythingthat is not a potential first relatum of the accessibility relation. By defining ‘sub-

jectivity’ as proposed in (S), we are therefore as it were defining it as the propertyof constituting a context in which ‘data’ is naturally seen as defined. Thus, ourdefinition of ‘subjectivity’ turns out to capture an intuitively significant property.Moreover, the description just given – ‘the property of constituting a context inwhich ‘data’ is naturally seen as defined’ – seems to provide no implausible in-terpretation of what we have in mind when talking of the property of ‘having afirst-person perspective’. Of course, thinking of ‘first-person perspectives’ or ‘phe-nomenal consciousness’ does not usually involve thoughts about data and contextsas they have here been introduced. But once one is acquainted with this terminol-ogy, there does not seem to be much cognitive dissonance (at least, not in my case)when one is asked to interpret those notions in the way here suggested, in termsof what contexts one would intuitively regard the concept of data to be defined in.

However, there are further, more straightforward reasons. It is not implausibleto say that the data are those truths that describe what I informally refer toas ‘my consciousness’. Since the concept of data is relativised to context andthe essence of being a datum is now assumed to consist in being a truth that isaccessible to me (where ‘me’ is again relativised), it seems only reasonable to think

of consciousnesses roughly as follows:(C) A consciousness is fully characterised by a set of truths such that there is

some entity to which exactly those truths are accessible that are containedin that set.

(P) Such a set is called the phenomenology of the corresponding consciousness.7

7For the present purposes, it is unnecessary to specify what a consciousness is, or what exactly




(B) Furthermore, given a particular consciousness, we will call the entities towhich the corresponding truths are accessible, the bearers of that conscious-ness.

Evidently, every bearer of a non -empty consciousness is also a potential first re-latum of the accessibility relation. But what about the empty consciousness, aswe may call that consciousness whose phenomenology contains no truths at all?According to the definitions of ‘consciousness’ and ‘bearer’ just given, every entityto which no truth is accessible would be a bearer of the empty consciousness – forexample, the number 5. But this would clearly be a highly inappropriate use of the term ‘consciousness’. As above, what offends us is the fact that 5 is a world-less entity, whereas the relation between bearer and consciousness must be of ametaphysical nature. To avoid this contradiction, we can either refuse to call theempty set a consciousness, or, what is potentially a less drastic measure, imposerestrictions on what kinds of entities can be bearers of consciousness.

To some, the notion of an empty consciousness may seem absurd in any case,and so, they will perhaps favour the first option. I cannot say that I agree withthis assessment. For what it is worth, that notion seems a little strange to me,but not really absurd . Perhaps, it can be made more palatable by the following

consideration. As will be agreed, there are much simpler consciousnesses thanthe typical human ones – but how simple is too simple? Clearly, we should avoiddrawing an arbitrary line here. Those that take an empty consciousness to bean absurdity would thus reasonably draw theirs between an empty consciousnessand a maximally simple, yet still non-empty one. In which case, what could sucha maximally simple consciousness look like? It might be roughly comparable tothe visual perception of an undivisibly small white spot that nevertheless fills thewhole visual field, since the latter is just large enough to contain the spot. Of course, there must be no accompanying thoughts whatsoever. This would be avery “still mind” indeed, and it is not necessarily easy to imagine such a simplekind of consciousness. But if one compares this to a situation where the spot isabsent, it would not seem that these two situations differ sufficiently to justify a

judgment to the effect that there is consciousness present in the first case but not

in the second. Arguably, it would be more natural to say that, in the second case,the consciousness is simply empty.

To be sure, an opponent of empty consciousness need not be impressed by thiskind of consideration. But then, the burden of proof clearly falls on his side, forif the notion of an empty consciousness is to be ruled out as ‘absurd’, there mustbe some good reason for this, and I am unable to see one.

What things, however, are the bearers of the empty consciousness? Obviouslynot any actual relata of the accessibility relation. But we also do not want to letevery entity be a bearer of consciousness (vide the number 5). The solution to thisdilemma that immediately suggests itself is to require the bearers of consciousnessto be at least potential relata of the accessibility relation. A bearer of the emptyconsciousness would then be a potential but not actual relatum of accessibility. If we adopt this solution – as I suggest we do –, the above definition (B) will have

to be replaced as follows:

(B) Given a particular consciousness, we will call the subjects to which the cor-responding truths are accessible, the bearers of that consciousness,

where ‘subject’ is to be understood in the sense of (S) above, namely, as equivalentto ‘potential first relatum of the accessibility relation’.

is meant by ‘being characterised’. Of this latter predicate, an intuitive understanding will fullysuffice for the time being.




We have now seen two ways in which (S) can be said to capture the intuitivenotion of subjectivity:

1. The concept of ‘data’ is plausibly regarded as defined exactly in the contextsof potential first relata of the accessibility relation.

2. All and only potential first relata of the accessibility relation are plausibly

regarded as bearers of consciousness.

This may suffice to establish the connection between our concept of subjectivityas defined in (S) and the common, intuitive notion of epistemological subjectivity.

3.1.3 Metaphysical Significance

Another important aspect of the concept of subjectivity is its metaphysical signif-icance. In some respects, this significance is already well established: For we havealready said that the relation of accessibility to which the concept is linked must bea metaphysical relation, and from this, it follows that the non-relational conditionsthat it imposes on its first relata must necessarily also have a metaphysical charac-ter. However, this is not yet quite enough, because, for our argument to succeed,

it will also be necessary to show that subjectivity is not a graded property .8

By a ‘graded property’, I mean a property that, like hardness for example,‘comes in degrees’. For a property to count as ‘graded’ in this sense, there mustbe an underlying variable with the following characteristics: (a) it is practically continuous, i.e., either truly continuous, or, if discrete, then such that the dif-ferences between adjacent degrees are insignificant for all practical purposes, and(b) the value of this variable must lie in a certain range for an entity to countas having the property in question. If this range is specified vaguely , i.e., withsome indeterminacy with respect to its borders, the property will itself be called‘vague’. If the range is specified precisely, the property will not be vague, but stillbe called ‘graded’. So, for example, our language knows a practically continuousvariable called ‘hardness’, in which an entity must have a comparatively high valuein order to count as having the property of the same name. Or in other words:

something counts as hard just in case it exhibits a comparatively high degree of hardness. This is trivial, of course, but its triviality should not mislead us intothinking that there is only one ‘hardness’. For there are (at least) two: The one isa property, which a thing can either instantiate or not, insofar as the term ‘hard’has a determinate semantics. The other is what I am here calling a ‘variable’,and can assume various values for different entities. If a property can be repre-sented by a set, the typical mathematical representation of a variable in this sensewould be a function; and like a function, a variable can have a certain domain

8See sect. 4.1 below. Occasionally, arguments have been proposed that might prima facie betaken to support the view that subjectivity is a graded property. So far, however, I have alwaysfound this appearance to be misleading. For example, Pauen (2000) argues that “subjectivity isobviously not a property that one can have either fully or not at all” (p. 112), but the sense of ‘subjectivity’ underlying his considerations is irretrievably empirical, bound up with notions of

‘body’ and cognitive capacities. Thus, his argument is completely irrelevant to the purposes of this chapter. Another example is Papineau’s defence (2002, ch. 7) of the claim that the conceptof “consciousness-as-such” is “vague”. His concept of ‘consciousness-as-such’ corresponds ratherclosely to our ‘subjectivity’, while what he takes to be the “vagueness” of this concept is perhapsbetter described as ‘ambiguity’. Crucially, his argument takes off on the thesis (supposedly estab-lished in earlier chapters) that there is no viable alternative to physicalism, and accordingly, it isthe assumption of a physicalistically inspired methodology that then leads him to his conclusionregarding the “vagueness” of ‘consciousness-as-such’. Since, however, we have no stake here inthe defense of physicalism, we are neither bound to a physicalistically inspired methodology andcan therefore safely ignore his argument.




and a certain range. For example, in the case of hardness, the domain consists insolid materials, and the values may be best thought of as properties (e.g., the twovague properties of being soft and being hard).9 Thus, properties and variablesare completely different abstract entities and should accordingly be kept separatefrom each other.

If subjectivity were a graded property, this would, according to our definition,

mean that there is some practically continuous variable that determines whethera given entity counts as a potential first relatum of the accessibility relation. Thissituation would be comparable to the case of the relation ‘x has y as a moon’mentioned above, which imposes on its first relata (as we may plausibly assume)the condition of being a planet. Idealising somewhat, the property of being a planetcan plausibly be thought of as a conjunction of several simpler properties, amongthem the property of being sufficiently large. Since this is obviously a gradedproperty – the underlying variable, known as ‘size’, is clearly continuous for allpractical purposes –, it follows that the property of being a planet is also graded.For illustration, imagine an unusually large conglomerate of rocks in some asteroidbelt or protoplanetary disk, perhaps a hundred miles in diameter. Certainly, itwould to a far lesser degree count as a planet than Pluto, for example, and theother rocks that circle around that conglomerate would hardly count as ‘moons’.

But let the conglomerate become larger and larger, and let its gravity graduallycrush the rocks into a molten core: no doubt the result will eventually meet allthe criteria for being a planet, and if certain bodies circling around it are called‘moons’, this will no longer be inappropriate.

The question, now, is whether subjectivity could also be a graded property.Suppose it were. It would then immediately follow that the non-relational condi-tions imposed on the first relata of the accessibility relation draw some arbitraryline with respect to the underlying variable. The line may be somewhat ‘fuzzy’, i.e.,those conditions may to some degree be vague with respect to where it should bedrawn, but it would be arbitrary none the less. Evidently, such arbitrariness can-not be solely the result of the metaphysics of accessibility. It would instead have toresult from some terminological decision , or from the properties of our perceptualand cognitive capacities. This can be well illustrated with our planets-and-moonsexample. The line between planets and proto-planets is certainly ‘fuzzy’, butthis does not take away anything from its arbitrariness, for we might easily besomewhat less or more liberal than we actually are with respect to applying thepredicate ‘planet’, and would not thereby run into any difficulties. Why, then, dowe not call any isolated rock circling around a star a ‘planet’? Because it is useful to have a distinction somewhere along the continuum, or because the differencessimply seem sufficiently salient to warrant the introduction of various categoriesfor different regions of that continuum. And sometimes, the differences are in factso salient that the introduction of different categories simply occurs to us, withoutmuch of a conscious decision on our part.

It is easily seen that nothing of this sort is at work in the case of subjectivity.For one thing, nowhere in the course of the derivation of the concept of subjectivity

has there been any decision to draw a line across a continuum. The relation of accessibility was postulated as part of the solution for the problem of distinguishingdata from other truths; nothing more was asked of it. And regarding the semanticsof ‘subjectivity’, the only arbitrary decision was to give this name to the property of being a potential first relatum of that relation. Nor do salient differences between

9Of course, finer differentiation is possible, leading to other sets of properties and thus otherways of interpreting ‘hardness’ as a function. I suppose that this merely adds to the ambiguityof that term.




such potential relata have any role to play in the semantics of ‘subjectivity’. Thisis small wonder, of course, since, before we have a more detailed picture of themetaphysics of accessibility, the only entity of which I know that it is a subjectam I myself. But even as that picture becomes more complete, and yields someidea of what kinds of entities could be first relata of the accessibility relation, itwould surely be wrong artificially to impose any restrictions on the set of these

potential relata – no matter how salient the differences between them may turnout to be. If we did, the arbitrariness of those restrictions would inevitably makethe concept of subjectivity correspondingly less interesting from a metaphysicalpoint of view. And without such metaphysical significance, we would clearly notbe much interested in the question of whether subjectivity can be satisfactorilyaccommodated by current physics. So, since there neither is nor should be anythingthat would make subjectivity a graded property, we can conclude that it is not agraded property, either.

3.1.4 Remaining Questions

Insofar as it is the task of metaphysics to “save the phenomena”, its project is thatof explanation, and must therefore proceed by generating and testing explanatory

hypotheses. Before any such hypotheses can be generated, however, it is neces-sary to identify the relevant questions. In the above derivation of the concept of subjectivity, the main motivating question has been that of why not all the truthsare data, i.e., the problem of distinguishing the data from other truths. But thisis only the first of a set of, overall, three questions that have to be directed at thenature of data in order to see in which sense and why physicalism is unsatisfactory:

(I) Why do the data not cover all the truths?

(II) Why do the data – or at least an important part of them – centre on acomparatively tiny part of the universe?

(III) Why do they centre on such a special part of the universe (e.g., on an organ-ism capable of perceiving and thinking about its surroundings, etc.)?

As is easily seen, these questions are so-to-speak ‘concentric’, in that they areincreasingly specific with regard to the problematised features of the set of all data.It will be recalled that the first question led us to the postulation of the accessibilityrelation as well as to the concept of ‘I’; but with this, its potential seemed to beexhausted. ‘I’ would have remained unrelativised, an objective predicate, had wenot, in sect. 2.4, begun to wonder why the data seem to centre only around acertain part of the universe. It was only this second question that prompted us tothe relativisation of the concept of ‘I’, and indeed, it was only in regard to thisquestion that the preferability of the answer we gave to Question I became evident.That relativisation, then, allowed us to define ‘subjectivity’ solely on the basis of accessibility. Without the relativisation of ‘I’, a subject could hardly have beenanything else than what is denoted by ‘I’, and we would have been stuck with a

position essentially tantamount to solipsism.Question I, then, can at this point be regarded as answered. Can the same

be said of the second question? Certainly not. It has led us to the concept of subjectivity, but so far, there is no explanation yet as to why the truths accessibleto a subject should centre only on a certain part of the universe, and withoutsuch an explanation, Question II remains unanswered. Moreover, it is extremelydesirable to provide an answer to this question, since it would have to be an




enormous coincidence if most or even all of the the data happened to centre onthe same tiny spatiotemporal region.10

3.2 The Knowledge Intuition

That the data center on a tiny spatio-temporal region is, strictly speaking, not yetknown. For, trivially, only of the known data can I know that they centre on sucha spatio-temporal region – in fact, I do know that they are so centred, namely,on a certain part of this organism. But from this, I can with respect to the datain general only infer that some of them, namely those I know of, centre on a tinyspatiotemporal region. It is, of course, intuitively plausible that I know more than

just a marginal fraction of the data, and this is also what we have been assumingfrom sect. 2.2 onward, but we have not yet discussed why this intuition shouldbe true. This is a major omission. It has just been hinted at how the truth of the intuition that I know most of the data – which I will in the following call the‘Knowledge Intuition’ – is required for Question II to arise, but it is worthwhileto point out the importance of this intuition in more general terms. Without thetruth of the Knowledge Intuition, all inference from the known data to the total

data would be so weak as to be useless: from a proposition to the effect that allof the known data are P , we could with respect to the data in general, as wehave already seen, only infer that some of them are P . This would not only affectQuestions II and III (neither of which would arise from the mere information thatsome of the data are centred on a certain part of an organism, however ‘special’its properties), but also Question I . For, if everything I can know pertains onlyto some of the data, as opposed to the most important part, or even only morethan just a tiny and utterly marginal fraction of them, there is no reason whynot every truth should be a datum. Hence, there would not even be a need todistinguish the data from other truths; only the known data would have to be sodistinguished, and for this, the postulation of a new relation named ‘accessibility’would presumably not be necessary. Since, therefore, the Knowledge Intuition isin more than one way crucially important to our project, we now have to turn to

the question of why and in what sense it might be true.11

Let us first, however, be more clear about the way the intuition should beunderstood. Above, it has typically been formulated simply like this: ‘I know animportant part of the data’. In this form, it may not be all that plausible; onewould probably initially prefer something like ‘I can know an important part of

10Of course, what such an explanation may most plausibly look like will already here beobvious: the explanation will have to analyse the accessibility relation in such a way that for atruth to be accessible to a subject means (in the sense of ‘to entail’) that it centres on either thesubject itself or on some other entity that stands in a certain kind of relationship to it. However,the issue cannot be dealt with quite as quickly, and we will have to return to it in sect. 3.5.11At this point, certain physicalists may want to offer a strikingly simple account of both the

fact that most data centre around a part of this organism as well as of the Knowledge Intuition:The latter, they claim, is true analytically , since only known data count as data in the first place;and the former is said to follow from the fact that that part of this organism on which the data

are centred is at the same time that part which does the thinking and judging, and therefore alsothe believing and knowing: i.e., my cognitive system . Furthermore, I am my cognitive system.All and only the truths that I know of – in some suitably specified, introspective way – are thedata, and because of this very fact, all the data centre on the tiny spatio-temporal region thatis my cognitive system, i.e., on myself.

I do find this kind of account attractive in its simplicity, even though it is, as the next chapterwill show, ultimately unsatisfactory. Our present task, however, is only to clarify the conceptualframework constructed in this and the previous chapter, which has to be neutral with respect tothe truth or falsehood of physicalism, and in particular, with respect to the question of whethersubjects are identical with their cognitive systems.




the data, if I choose to direct my attention accordingly and formulate adequatepropositions to capture the contents of my consciousness’. But this should notnecessarily deter us from using the simpler formulation. After all, it is a well-known fact that one knows many things that one has never even thought of. (Iknow, e.g., that earth-worms don’t fly, even though this thought has never beforeoccurred to me.) Correspondingly, it might still be correct to say that I know an

important part of the data, regardless of whether I actually pay any attention tothem. But however that may be, I will in the following continue to speak simplyof ‘knowledge’. Nothing important (at least as far as our argument is concerned)hinges on these points.

What also needs to be clarified is the locution: ‘an important part of the data’.The reason why I have preferred this to the simpler ‘most of the data’ lies in thefact that it is intuitively not the case that I really know most of the data, evenin the relatively weak sense just mentioned. As far as I am concerned, there maybe many truths in my phenomenology that I could never have cognitive access to,because their influence on my cognitive apparatus is simply too weak. But weneed not be overly worried by this, because these data should not be consideredparticularly ‘important’ members of my phenomenology. What makes them less‘important’ than others is, to a first approximation, the lack of intensity, or the

‘faintness’ of the states they describe. So, ‘an important part’ does not only referto the number of the data in question (or the amount of information contained inthem), but equally well to their intensity. What the metaphysics of phenomenalintensity might consist in is an interesting issue that, admittedly, our conceptualframework so far sheds little light on.

Finally, another problematic point of the Knowledge Intuition in its presentformulation has to do with the use of the word ‘I’. It is a near-truism that mythinking and feeling, judging etc. happens in my brain, more specifically, in acertain part of my brain that we may refer to as my ‘cognitive system’.12 It will,thus, also be my cognitive system that does my knowing , which, like the thinking,feeling, judging and so on, is mine only by virtue of that system’s being mine.Or in other words: I, as a subject, ‘have’ thoughts, feeling, knowledge etc. onlyin the sense that my cognitive system has thoughts, feelings, knowledge etc., suchthat the truths describing these states are accessible to me. The question that thisraises is, of course: what does it mean for a cognitive system to be ‘mine’?

Plausibly, if a cognitive system is said to be ‘mine’, this entails that some of thetruths describing the system’s cognitive state comprise a part of the data. For, if the Knowledge Intuition is true and I know the most important part of the data,then it must be true that the data describe, at least to a large part, thoughts,feelings, desires etc. (for so they seem to do), and all of these, as we said, areprimarily the thoughts, feelings, desires etc. of my cognitive system. But on theother hand, it is neither the case that all of the truths describing my system’scognitive state are data, nor does it seem necessary in order for the system tobe ‘mine’ that they comprise the most important or even more than just a verymarginal part of the data. Informally, one could say that a cognitive system is

mine if it ‘does my thinking’ (which is here meant to include also my feeling,desiring, believing etc.), but if we suppose that a given system does only part of my thinking, should it not be mine anymore? There does not seem to be any goodreason to suppose so.13 To the contrary, it is quite conceivable that only a small

12Some might argue that my cognitive system, far from being only a part of my brain, evenextends beyond my body . That may be; but such considerations are of little interest here.13An interesting question that we shall not pursue here is whether a subject could ‘have’ more

than one cognitive system.




part of a subject’s phenomenology consists in truths about some system’s cognitivestate, and that system’s thoughts and desires etc. could then still be regarded asthose of the subject, insofar as the truths describing them are accessible to it.Why should the same not be true in my case?

Like most rhetorical questions, this one, too, has an obvious answer: ‘Becausethis would contradict the Knowledge Intuition’. Which again leads us to the

question of how this intuition can be true.

3.3 Possession Conditions of the Concept of Data

To begin with, it bears pointing out that the Knowledge Intuition does not statethat every subject knows the most important part of the truths accessible to it.Rather, it says that I know the most important part of the data . Since thismy knowledge is nevertheless, as has just been mentioned, primarily that of mycognitive system, it may be useful to have a look at what it means for a cognitivesystem to know what the data consist in. And since this knowledge is, moreover, dedicto knowledge, i.e., knowledge of the form, ‘the data are such-and-such’ (eitherusing the concept of data itself or some broadly comparable other concept), it will

be particularly interesting to see what it means for a cognitive system to have andexercise the concept of data.It seems quite plausible to assume that ‘data’ is usually exercised in roughly the

following simple way: First, the system in question subjects its state to a processof introspective analysis, resulting in some internal representation of this state.And this representation, when brought into a suitable form so as to represent thecorresponding proposition (e.g., the proposition that there is a “white spot in thecentre of the visual field”), is then taken by the system to represent a ‘datum’.Essentially, this seems to be all there is to it. Of course, it would at this point beinteresting to know how it is ensured that the constructed representation correctlydescribes the state under consideration. In this respect, however, I have no moreto offer than the suggestion made in footnote 10 of the previous chapter. That is,to recapitulate, the correctness of the representation may plausibly be ensured by

the fact that the represented state is itself a constitutive part of the represent ing state, in such a way even as to determine the content of the representation. Thequestion of whether this hypothesis is plausible also from a neurophysiologicalpoint of view has to await further investigation.

However such an investigation may turn out, it will be clear that, for any systempossessing the concept of data, it is semantically tied to the respective system’sintrospective faculties. For, it is the truths discovered through introspection, be itas described in the last paragraph or otherwise, that form the primary examplesof what a system refers to as data. The fact that, in sect. 2.1 above, the term‘data’ has been informally introduced precisely by use of examples drawn fromintrospection should have some weight in this respect. With a familiar turn of phrase, one could therefore say that the introspective mechanism fixes the referenceof the system’s concept of data, much like our typical epistemic access to samples

of water fixes the reference of our water-concept. Certainly, to fix the referenceof a concept is not yet to fully determine it. For example, although the propertyof being water will have to be such that it is common to all the typical samplesof water – i.e., those that fix the reference – as well as uninstantiated by all thetypical samples of non-water, the set of properties satisfying this criterion is stilllarger than one. So, besides the actual property of being water, namely beingH2O, we also have, e.g., (1) the superficial property of looking, tasting and feeling




like H2O, (2) the indexical property of being the kind of stuff that fills our riversand lakes, and (3) the non-projectible property of being H2O within a distanceof 100,000 miles from the centre of the Earth. Out of these, it seems that theproperty of being H2O tout court is selected primarily because it is (for a numberof reasons) the most useful one to have a concept for.

Can we in a similar way simply choose which kind of truths we want the concept

of data stand for, as long as the reference-fixing cases are included? If that werethe case, the semantics of that concept would, of course, be much more open andindeterminate than it had previously seemed – which means that there must besomething that puts an additional constraint on the meaning of ‘data’. Now, thissomething is, I suggest, nothing else than the Knowledge Intuition itself. For,this intuition, when taken as a ‘partial definition’ (or, to use Carnap’s term, as ameaning-postulate), constrains the meaning of ‘data’ in precisely such a way thatthe set of all data consists for the most important part in those truths that arein the respective context discoverable by way of introspection. And apparently,this is completely in accordance with the way that the term ‘data’ has so farbeen used. It thus emerges that the meaning of ‘data’ is fully captured by one’sintrospection (which provides the ‘reference-fixing’ examples), combined with theKnowledge Intuition as a meaning-postulate to put an ‘upper limit’ to how far

the extension of that concept can reach beyond what one’s introspection is able toreveal. Consequently, it seems entirely justified to adopt the Knowledge Intuitionas a meaning-postulate for ‘data’.

Except that ‘meaning-postulate’ is not quite the right word. If the KnowledgeIntuition really were a meaning-postulate in the classical sense, it would be simplyanalytically true, which would clearly introduce a strong bias for an ultimatelyphysicalistic metaphysics of subjectivity. For, if every subject had to know themajority of the truths accessible to it, it would be hard to see how subjects couldexist independently of cognitive systems, since it is to these that thought, judg-ment, belief and knowledge are primarily attributable. And as far as we know, allcognitive systems are rather complex physical systems. To be sure, there might benon-physical cognitive systems (computers made of ectoplasm, for example), butit would certainly be unreasonable to burden the cause of antiphysicalism withsuch metaphysical extravagance, if it can at all be avoided. Hence, the KnowledgeIntuition should not be regarded as analytically true. Instead, we will merely treatit as a constraint on what it means for a cognitive system to ‘have’ the concept of data.14 It complements introspection in its task of fixing the reference. Just like asystem cannot be said to have the concept of data if it has no introspective facultyto provide it with examples, it neither has that concept if it does not believe thatthese examples are somehow representative. Or, more precisely, I propose that asystem has the concept of data just in case it has a concept whose semantics isdetermined by exactly the following two features:

(1) The system takes the exemplary referents of the concept to be those truthswhich are revealed to it through introspection (roughly in the way describedabove); and

(2) The system believes the concept’s extension to consist for the most impor-tant part in those truths which can be thus revealed (and are in this sense‘introspectively accessible’).

14This could also be put in terms of ‘what the concept of data is’, but I would here like tokeep a certain distance to this question. It would probably lead too far if we were also to discussthe hotly-debated issue of what kinds of things concepts are.




Needless to add, this concept is then the concept of data, and the system uses itcorrectly as long as it does so in accordance with these conditions.

I should emphasise that what the system here “believes” about that conceptis, though not analytic, still true a priori , because these beliefs determine thesemantics of the concept insofar as it is ‘had’ by the system in question. Therewould, after all, be little point in having a system’s beliefs about the extension of

its concepts determine the latter’s semantics if these beliefs could be false.What we now have to look at is the question of what the system’s uses of the

concept of data can refer to in the contexts of those subjects for which the system‘is doing the thinking’. The possession conditions just specified are particularlyrelevant in this respect.

3.4 Vicarious Cognition and the Paradox of Phe-

nomenal Judgment

We have already taken a few stabs, in the present and the previous section, at thenotion of a cognitive system’s ‘doing the thinking’ for one or more subjects. It isnow time to give the relation between a subject and ‘its’ cognitive system a proper

name. ‘Ownership’ might at first suggest itself, but is ultimately inappropriate,because there is no conclusive reason why a cognitive system should not be ableto ‘do the thinking’ for more than one subject. I will therefore call the subjectsfor which a certain system is ‘doing the thinking’ not the ‘owners’, but only the‘(cognitive) beneficiaries’ of that system. And as for the way the possession con-ditions of a certain concept affect the extension of a system’s uses of that conceptin the respective contexts of its beneficiaries, I would propose the following simpleprinciple: The possession conditions apply equally well.15

In its simplicity, this principle seems to me plausible enough not to requirefurther justification. When applied to the concept of data, it entails that a system’suses of the concept ‘the data’ can, in the context of any beneficiary, refer only tosuch sets of truths as satisfy the conditions (1) and (2) above. That is, for anysuch set, the beneficiary subject must believe that its introspection (which is theintrospection of its cognitive system) can reveal the most important part of thetruths contained in that set – or in other words: the subject must believe in theKnowledge Intuition –; and this belief must, moreover, be true. The belief itself does not seem to be a problem, since it is simply taken over from the cognitivesystem.16 The requirement, however, that it also be a true belief significantlyconstrains the way the metaphysics of accessibility can be fleshed out in a givencontext. On the one hand, there is the Knowledge Intuition, which is true in everycontext where it can be conceived; its form is ‘I know the most important part of the data’, which, if the analysis presented in previous sections is correct, amountsto ‘I know the most important part of the truths accessible to me’. But now,

15I should make clear, however, what I mean by the system’s “uses” of a concept. I do notmean ‘ways of usage’ or ‘purposes for which the concept can be used’, but rather ‘occurrences of

usage’. And by that, I mean not so much external utterances as rather occurrences of internal usage.’Mental representations’ might be a good alternative term.16If the subject were a beneficiary of more than one cognitive system, this would admittedly

be more problematic. But, insofar as the subject could not be said to ‘inherit’ the belief from itssystem, it would follow that the system’s uses of the concept of data do not satisfy this concept’spossession conditions in the context of that subject. So, even though the system could still besaid to ‘have’ that concept, the subject itself could not. And hence, it would lack the necessaryconcept to be able to conceive the Knowledge Intuition. The latter will thus still be a priori truein every context where it can be conceived.




suppose the accessibility relation is subjected to further analysis, e.g., by beingidentified with some concrete metaphysical relation M . Then, we have, on theother hand, an analysed version of the Knowledge Intuition, whose form is ‘I knowthe most important part of the truths M -related to me’. Patently, this latterproposition is not necessarily true in every context where it can be conceived.And in those contexts where it is, unlike the original version of the Knowledge

Intuition, not true, the hypothetical analysis of accessibility cannot be true either.For, if I know the most important part of the truths accessible to me, but not themost important part of the truths M -related to me, it follows that the accessibilityrelation is not the same as the M -relation.

Unless all subjects are identical with their cognitive systems, and unless ourhypothetical M -relation is closely correlated with introspective accessibility, thereis nothing to rule out the possibility that for some subjects, only a marginal partof the truths M -related to them is introspectively accessible to their respectivecognitive systems. In the context of such a subject, it would clearly be wrong toidentify accessibility with the M -relation. Why is this important? Because I myself would not know whether I am such a subject! After all, my entire knowledge is theknowledge of my cognitive system; if accessibility were to be analysed as a relationindependent of introspective accessibility (or ‘introspectibility’, as one could also

say), there would be no telling whether the most important part of the truthsaccessible to me are also introspectively accessible to me (i.e, via my cognitivesystem). On the other hand, however, the accessibility relation is intended to haveno other conceptual basis than the concept of data. It may be ‘analysed’ andidentified with some independently given relation, but it will always be whatever relation it is – provided there is such a relation, but this is what we have beenassuming ever since sect. 2.4 – by which the data are related to me. Consequently,as has already been mentioned in the previous paragraph, the original versionof the Knowledge Intuition is assumed to be equivalent to its ‘slightly analysed’version, namely: ‘I know the most important part of the truths accessible to me’(where the knowledge in question is, of course, knowledge by introspection). Thus,since the former version of the Knowledge Intuition is true in every context whereit can be conceived, so is the latter. But then, we just said that there would be “notelling” whether I can introspectively know the most important part of the truthsaccessible to me, if “accessibility were to be analysed as a relation independentfrom introspective accessibility”. It therefore follows that accessibility is not to beanalysed in that way. Certainly, this seems to be an embarrassing situation forany proponent of an antiphysicalist interpretation of accessibility. And it is.

What we have here is simply another instance of the Paradox of PhenomenalJudgment. As may be recalled, this paradox arises out of the fact that my obser-vational phenomenal judgments cannot be justified unless the states of affairs theyreport are causally relevant for them. Together with the intuition that my obser-vational phenomenal judgments are (at least usually) justified, this fact militatesstrongly against any analysis of phenomenality that does not restrict the realm of the phenomenal to the realm of the causally relevant, or, in the drier terminology

here developed: against any analysis of accessibility that does not closely correlatethis relation with that of introspective accessibility. This is exactly the situationwe are here faced with. The only difference from the present case lies in the factthat the Knowledge Intuition is here no longer regarded as a mere intuition, but,instead, as a proposition that is a priori true in every context where it can be con-ceived. This view on the Knowledge Intuition, however, already marks the firststep of our escape from the Paradox, since it guarantees the a priori character of the validity of our phenomenal judgments.




It may be worthwhile to elaborate a little bit on the Paradox, as it appears inthe present theoretical context. We have seen that the Knowledge Intuition signif-icantly constrains the set of potential referents of a cognitive system’s uses of theconcept of data in the context of a given beneficiary, and thereby also constrainswhat analyses of the accessibility relation are available in that context. There areessentially two cases to consider: either the accessibility relation can in a given

context be analysed as a metaphysical relation not bound to introspective acces-sibility, or it cannot (see figure 3.1). The latter can be regarded as the ‘defaultcase’ and obtains whenever the only acceptable relations between the subject con-stituting the context and the truths introspectively accessible to it hold already invirtue of just this introspectibility.17 That is, without introspectibility, there willin such a context be no accessibility either, so that not only introspectibility entailsaccessibility, but also, conversely, the property of being accessible to the subjectentails the property of being introspectible to it: the two properties have to be(materially) equivalent . In the former case, by contrast, there is some acceptablerelation that does not already hold in virtue of introspectibility. Thus, there willbe some metaphysically respectable relation by which the subject happens to berelated to the most important part of the truths introspectively accessible to it,but that it is so related need not be due to introspectibility. Hence, the proper-

ties of being accessible to the subject and of being introspectible to it need notbe materially equivalent to each other (although they could be). According tothese two cases, we can in general differentiate between two sets of beneficiariesof a cognitive system: those for which (i.e., in whose contexts and with respect towhich) accessibility has to be equivalent to introspectibility, and those for whichthe two relations do not have to be equivalent. It follows from the conceptualconnection between ‘data’ and ‘accessibility’ that the set of truths to which thecognitive system’s uses of the concept ‘the data’ refers can be quite different acrosscontexts, although the most important part of this set will always be formed bythe truths accessible to the system’s introspection.

In an antiphysicalist metaphysic where subjects are not identical to their cog-nitive system, it is to be expected that cognitive systems can have both kinds of beneficiaries. Naturally, if a subject is the beneficiary of such a system, it has noway of coming to know to which kind it belongs, since all it can know is whatits cognitive system can know, and this knowledge will be the same for all of the system’s beneficiaries: This is the form of the Paradox that we are here con-fronted with. In the face of such a situation, what should one think with respectto the correct analysis of accessibility, when there is no way to know whether,in one’s particular context, that relation must be conceived of as equivalent tointrospectibility or whether another kind of analysis is also possible (and per-haps preferable)? The antiphysicalist position may seem rather hopeless at thispoint. If I, as a matter of principle, cannot know whether accessibility must, inmy context and with respect to me, be equivalent to introspectibility, I cannotwell have an argument showing that accessibility should be analysed otherwise.But if there is no such argument, how should I argue against a physicalist analysis

of that relation? Since introspectibility does apparently not pose any problemsfor a physicalist account, would I not have to argue against the equivalence of

17By ‘acceptable’, I mean first of all to exclude those relations that are inherently unfit for ametaphysical analysis of accessibility, such as, e.g., ‘x knows someone whose brother thinks thaty’. It is not entirely clear whether disjunctive relations should also be excluded, but it seems Ican leave this issue unsettled for the time being. In any case, however, for a relation M to be inthis sense ‘acceptable’ implies that the subject in question is M -related to the most importantpart of the truths introspectively accessible to it.




The concept of

data

Possession conditions:

(1) Introspection(2) The ‘Knowledge

Intuition’

The cognitive

system

Its uses of the con-

cept of data (‘mentalrepresentations’).

Subjects:

Those for which the sys-tem’s uses of the concept‘the data’ denote onlythe set of those truthsthat are introspectivelyaccessible to the system.

Those for which theseuses denote a set con-taining more than justthe introspectible truths.

Figure 3.1: The concept of data, a cognitive system, and its beneficiary subjects.A cognitive system’s representations count as uses of the concept of data only if the system satisfies, in relation to these representations, the possession conditionsassociated with the concept of data. What these uses refer to in the context of a

given beneficiary, however, is not in every case the same.

accessibility and introspectibility – which, as we have just seen, I cannot do?Fortunately, this predicament is only an apparent one. The fallacy in the line

of reasoning just presented lies in an equivocation of the word ‘introspectibility’.On the one hand, there is introspectibility to a cognitive system: this is the re-lation that physicalists will have little difficulty accounting for. But on the otherhand, we have introspectibility to a beneficiary of such a system, and this is therelation at play in the previous paragraph. Since this kind of introspectibility isobviously mediated by the relation between a cognitive system and its beneficiary,a physicalist account of it will necessarily have to specify what this latter relationconsists in. Here, then, is the loophole through which the anti-physicalist can es-

cape from the Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment, and the ground on which he canat last hope successfully to confront the physicalist. It must be said, however, thatthe correct analysis of the relation between a cognitive system and its beneficiarieswill only indirectly be the object of contention. This relation is inextricably boundup with the concept of a cognitive system, and we have no need for this. There isa more fundamental concept than that of a cognitive beneficiary, with respect towhich the physicalist’s position can be more conveniently attacked: namely, theconcept of subjectivity.

But still, there is a problem. Nothing so far seems to rule out the possibilitythat a subject can be a beneficiary of more than one cognitive system. Apparently,all that is needed for this to be the case is that in addition to the truths describingthe cognitive state of one such system, there are also truths accessible to the sub jectin question that describe the cognitive state of another system. If the first set of

truths suffices to make the subject a beneficiary of the first system, and the secondto make it a beneficiary of the second one, it would seem natural to conclude thatthe subject will then be a beneficiary of both systems, so that, whenever eitherof them has a belief or desire, this will also be the belief or desire of the subjectitself. Furthermore, the subject would be unable to know of how many systems itis a beneficiary. This inevitably leads to the awkward question whether I myself could not be a beneficiary of more than one system. Apparently, nothing I know




as a beneficiary of one of those systems could exclude this possibility. Hence, onemight even ask why I should not be the beneficiary of all the cognitive systemsthere are.

Evidently, something must have gone wrong here. If I am indeed a beneficiaryof more than one cognitive system, why does it seem to me that I am a beneficiaryof just one system? Of course, it could be replied that it seems to me that way

simply because it seems that way to a cognitive system of which I am a beneficiary.But this is not going to satisfy us. When it seems to me that I am a beneficiaryof just one system, this is meant to imply that it seems to me that I do not haveany beliefs in addition to those that I have qua beneficiary of this system – infact, I am rather convinced of not having any such further beliefs. Yet, if it werepossible that I am a beneficiary of more than one system, this conviction wouldrest on a shaky foundation. What is more, for every belief to the effect that p

that I might have qua beneficiary of one system, I could easily believe that non- pdue to my being a beneficiary of a second system, and I would never notice thecontradiction. So, what this leads to is apparently a scenario where my thinkingdoes not in general respect the rules of logic. But can this be a possibility weought to take seriously? It would seem that it is not. Or at least, it is a possibilitythat contradicts the initial, implicit assumption of my theorising, namely, the as-

sumption of its rationality. Without some initial confidence that my reasoning willbe rational, it would have been more rational not even to start. Correspondingly,because of the vital role that the assumption of my own rationality has played formy entire reasoning so far, it would be rather inconsequent to start questioningthat assumption only because my reasoning has led to the discovery of a possiblescenario where it is false. In fact, that possibility was also there in the very be-ginning. I did not take it seriously then, so why should I do so now? This is notto say that the possibility is ruled out ; we will only continue to assume that it isnot actually the case.

3.5 The Concepts of Adjunction and Φ

Returning, now, to the beginning of this section, it may be recalled that Ques-tion II asked why “the data – or at least an important part of them – centreon a comparatively tiny part of the universe”. Given our above remarks on theKnowledge Intuition, it may seem that this question has already been answered.After all, that intuition even states that the most important part of the data areintrospectible to a cognitive system. Since cognitive systems tend to be rathertiny parts of the universe, and since for a truth to be introspectible to such a sys-tem obviously means to centre on it, it may well be taken to follow that the factasked about in Question II is simply a consequence of the Knowledge Intuition.However, the latter is guaranteed to be true only in every context where it can beconceived . This may be enough to do justice to its intuitive appeal, but it stillleaves to explain why the Knowledge Intuition can be conceived in this context.The obvious explanation for this is that I am a beneficiary of a certain kind of

cognitive system. But why am I such a beneficiary? If we were to explain thiswith the possession conditions for the concept of ‘I’ (as we did in the case of theKnowledge Intuition), we would be going in a circle: those possession conditionswould (more or less) have to entail that the concept of ‘I’ can, in every contextwhere it can be conceived, only refer to the entity constituting that context; but inorder to explain that the concept of ‘I’ can be conceived in my context, we wouldagain have to invoke the fact that I am a beneficiary of a cognitive system.




I do not yet, however, want to consider the question of why I am a beneficiary of a cognitive system; this would already be addressing Question III. Instead, I wouldat this point like to ask for the reasons of a more general fact, and (re)interpretQuestion II accordingly. For, in order for a subject to be a beneficiary of a cognitivesystem, it is necessary that a certain part of the truths accessible to the subjectcentre on that system, describing its cognitive state. This part need not exactly be

“important” – it may also be only a “small” part, as has been conceded at the endof sect. 3.2 –, but if other, equally or more important parts of the data centred onfurther systems, describing their cognitive states, then the subject would also be abeneficiary of those. That this possibility does not obtain in my own case followsfrom the assumption of my own rationality, as explained at the end of the previoussection. But nevertheless, one may ask if this assumption does not call for quitean unlikely coincidence, since it requires that the data be to a significantly largerextent centred on one particular cognitive system, rather than on others as well.Why should there be such a clustering? This, then, is how I would like Question IIto be understood.

There are essentially two ways how this question could be approached. Onemay either go the direct way and ask how an ontologically parsimonious explana-tion of the said fact might look like, or, taking a less direct approach, develop a

very basic analysis of the accessibility relation in the hope that it may yield thedesired explanation. While both are viable options, the direct way happens to berelatively cumbersome. I will therefore here present only the other approach.

Considering that accessibility is a relation between entities ‘in the world’ onthe one side and truths on the other, there is not much of a choice as to whatthe first step of an analysis of this relation has to look like. It is, I think, safeto assume that truths are, like all propositions, abstract entities, and are thus notdisposed to be relata of metaphysical relations. To put it informally: they ‘do notfloat around’, like atoms or molecules, for other things to enter into metaphysical(e.g., spatial) relationships with. Rather, there seem to be only two general kindsof relations that may be instantiated between propositions and concrete entities:(1) representational relations, and (2) relations based on the ‘aboutness’ of (or‘involvement’ by) propositions.18 The former are based solely on our interpretationof signs and other (e.g., mental) representations, such as we find where a set of chalk marks looking like ‘CH ’ is taken to express the Continuum Hypothesis.It is commonplace that these relations are not instantiated ‘all by themselves’,but only for us, who interpret those representations. The second kind consistsof relations based on the relation between propositions and the entities they are‘about’, in the way the proposition expressed by ‘John loves Mary’ is about bothJohn and Mary. It could be argued that this relation, too, is representational, onthe grounds that our concepts are nothing else but abstract objects derived fromour own mental representations. This may be true; but still, the relation between asign and the proposition it stands for is clearly different from the relation betweenan entity and the proposition it is involved in. Moreover, whereas the questionwhich signs represent which propositions is often decided by conventions and other

contingent factors, it is so-to-speak intrinsic for a proposition which entities itinvolves: propositions are partly individuated by the entities they are about. So,whereas one and the same proposition could be represented by one sign today anda completely different sign tomorrow, two propositions that involve different sets of entities could never be the same. Because of this difference between the two kindsof relations, it will be obvious that the accessibility relation cannot plausibly be a

18Cf. above, p. 36.




truths

part of the universe

adjunction

subject

accessibilityΦ

Figure 3.2: What accessibility consists in. See text for explanation.

representational relation, but must, instead, be based on ‘aboutness’.19 Whenevera truth is accessible to some subject s, there must consequently be a further entityx such that the truth involves x, and the subject stands in a certain kind of

relationship to x. More precisely: there have to be (non-Cambridge) relations R1

and R2 such that (1) for all t and x, R1(t, x) entails that t is a truth about x, and(2) for all t, t’s accessibility to s is metaphysically equivalent to there being somex such that R1(t, x) and R2(s, x). I will call R1 the Φ-relation (‘Φ’ being short for‘phenomenology’), and R2 the adjunction relation (see figure 3.2).

Needless to say, the metaphysics of the adjunction relation is thereby not yetsettled. It could be an already familiar relation just as well as something com-pletely new. On the familiar side, for example, it could even be the identity re-lation: the cognitive system or organism (or whatever) on which the phenomeno-logical truths are centred would then itself be the subject. Presumably, this isthe hypothesis that a physicalist would favour.20We will see in the next chapter,however, that this would not make for a very satisfactory position.

It may be a little surprising that the Φ-relation is not the same as ‘aboutness’,

but instead only entails it. The primary reason for this – in fact, the reasonwhy it would even be implausible to equate Φ with the ‘aboutness relation’ –lies in the fact that it is a pervasive feature of the data to be associated withdifferent degrees of phenomenal intensity .21 Because of this pervasiveness, it isquite natural (in fact, almost inevitable) to conclude that the basis of phenomenalintensity must lie in the accessibility relation, since it is by virtue of accessibilitythat a truth becomes a datum. Given our analysis of accessibility into adjunctionand Φ, the basis of phenomenal intensity must, moreover, lie in at least one of these relations. We may as yet not be able to say much about the adjunction

19This is not to say that the two kinds of relations do not overlap; they do. For example, if a sequence of chalk marks resembling ‘John loves Mary’ is taken to represent the propositionthat John loves Mary, this relation will be based just as much on the fact that the propositionin question involves John and Mary as it will be based on a putative representational relation

between the ‘John’ and ‘Mary’ parts of that sequence and, respectively, John and Mary.Nor should ‘aboutness’ here be misunderstood in the sense that a proposition is ‘about’ some

given entity only if this entity is explicitly named in it. Just as data can be said to ‘centre’ on anorganism simply by ‘having to do’ with it (sect. 2.3), not much more is meant when I here saythat a proposition is ‘about’ or ‘involves’ an entity. So, there is in fact no difference in meaningbetween ‘centering on’ and ‘being about’ or ‘involving’. I only use the former term when talkingof a plurality of propositions (or a conjunction thereof), to indicate that each of them is ‘about’the specified entity.20Cf. footnote 11 above, p. 51.21See sect. 3.2 above.




relation in this respect, but it is fairly obvious that at least the differences inphenomenal intensity of the various data must be accounted for by differencesin the strengths of the respective Φ-relationships. After all, those differences inphenomenal intensity clearly seem to correlate quite closely with differences in‘cerebral celebrity’ (to use Dennett’s term) – i.e., the degree to which they influenceother cognitive processes –, and it is the Φ-relation that provides the connection

from the cognitive system to the data.22

So, it follows rather straighforwardlyfrom the gradedness of phenomenal intensity that the Φ-relation, too, must begraded, and that the degree of phenomenal intensity must consist in the strengthof the Φ-relation, possibly combined with the strength of the respective subject’sadjunction to the part of the universe it is adjoined to. Moreover, since Φ is gradedand the aboutness relation patently not, we see that the two relations cannot beidentified with each other.

With a new metaphysical analysis of a phenomenal feature, however, comesa new threat from the Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment. On the one hand, weregard phenomenal intensity as a feature of the relation between a subject andits data. But on the other hand, we just said that differences in phenomenal in-tensity “seem to correlate quite closely with differences in ‘cerebral celebrity’ ”.The question that this provokes is: How can this cognitive system know anything

about those correlations? Indeed, how can this cognitive system know that thereis such a thing as phenomenal intensity in the first place? As far as I can see, theonly way to answer this is to incorporate the correlation of phenomenal intensitieswith degree of cognitive influence (or some other causally effective variable) in thepossession conditions for the concept, similar to the way the Knowledge Intuitionhas above been made a part of the possession conditions for the concept of data.Accordingly, a cognitive system’s representations would count as uses of the con-cept of phenomenal intensity only if, under the assumption that they are uses of that concept, the system’s judgments on the phenomenal intensity of ‘its’ dataare typically correlated to some considerable degree with the degree of cognitiveinfluence of those truths. Furthermore, these judgments would also have to countas true insofar as they are in that way correlated.

Evidently, if judgments on phenomenal intensity are thus a priori correlatedwith degree of cognitive influence, it has to be asked why phenomenal intensity is,then, not simply the same as degree of cognitive influence. The answer is twofold.Phenomenal intensity would be the same if (a) cognitive influence were the sameas the Φ-relation, and if (b) the adjunction relation were ungraded (as would, e.g.,be the case if it were the identity relation). As for (a), the reason why I hesitateto equate cognitive influence with the Φ-relation lies partly in the fact that theformer concept is simply not yet well enough defined, partly in the irrelevance of the metaphysical analysis of Φ for our antiphysicalist argument (hence, no needto commit to any such analysis), and finally in the fact that the term ‘cognitive’suggests an exclusive applicability to cognitive systems, for which there seemsto be, with respect to the Φ-relation, no principled reason. And, as for (b), weobviously do not yet know whether the adjunction relation is ungraded. If it is

asked why the adjunction relation should be relevant for phenomenal intensity inthe first place: the reason is that phenomenal intensity is clearly conceived of asa feature of the data , and as such, bound to our analysis of what it means to be

22Furthermore, even if they did not correlate at all with differences in ‘cerebral celebrity’,they would have to correlate with differences in some other neurophysiological or functionallydefinable variable, since we would otherwise hardly be in a position to make judgments aboutthem. Of course, this leads us to another instance of the Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment, towhich we will turn shortly.




a datum. (It should also be noted in this connection that it is chiefly the conceptof phenomenal intensity that gives meaning to the phrase “the most importantpart” in our formulation of the Knowledge Intuition.) Thus, phenomenal intensityis as it were bound to accessibility ‘as a whole’; if accessibility is analysed into twocomponents, both of which are graded relations, the combined strength of both of these relations must be regarded as phenomenal intensity.

The present analysis of the accessibility relation also serves to clarify what itmeans to be a cognitive beneficiary. The whole point of letting cognitive systemshave ‘cognitive beneficiaries’ potentially different from themselves was to equipourselves with a concept of subjectivity according to which subjects are at leastnot a priori identical with cognitive systems. It would, therefore, not make muchsense to suppose that non-subjects could also be beneficiaries of a cognitive system.But what makes a subject a beneficiary of a given system? At the end of sect. 3.2,we said that in order for a cognitive system to be ‘mine’, it is required that truthsdescribing some of its cognitive states be among my data, i.e., accessible to me. Tosay that a cognitive system is ‘mine’ is, of course, the same as saying that I am itsbeneficiary. Furthermore, now that we have analysed accessibility as a combinationof adjunction and the Φ-relation, the only way how truths centering on some partof the universe can become accessible to a subject is for the subject to be adjoined

to that part of the universe. From this, it follows that a subject cannot be abeneficiary of a cognitive system unless by being adjoined to it. That a subject isadjoined to a cognitive system does not in itself entail that it is a beneficiary of thatsystem, but adjunction is still the underlying relation – the ‘essence’, so-to-speak– of what it means to be the beneficiary of a cognitive system.

In the previous section, it was stated that in different contexts, different anal-yses of the accessibility relation will be acceptable (i.e., compatible with what theconcept of data refers to in the respective contexts). These differences, however, donot affect the acceptability of the present analysis of accessibility into adjunctionand Φ-relation. As we just said, a subject is a beneficiary of a cognitive systemonly by being adjoined to it. So, in any context where the concept of accessibilitycan be conceived at all (which will always be the context of a beneficiary of somecognitive system), it must be analysed in such a way that accessibility-relationsconsist partly in adjunctions; otherwise, the analysis would be incorrect, and thusinacceptable.

This leaves, therefore, only Φ subject to differing analyses. As will be recalled,the concept of data must in every context refer to a set of truths that are for themost important part introspectible. For some subjects, this means that accessibil-ity and introspectibility are equivalent: in the contexts of these, Φ will thus haveto be the same as the introspectibility relation, i.e., the same as the relation ‘x isintrospectible to y’, where the place of y would in any instance be taken by somecognitive system. For others, some other analysis would be acceptable, such as,e.g., ‘cerebral celebrity’, or, for a more general relation, ‘x is the description of a state of y’. In any case, however, it would have to be kept in mind that therelation must be graded . Hence, any satisfactory analysis would have to specify

what the strength (or ‘intensity’) of the Φ-relation should be taken to consist in.In the case of introspectibility, this might be the degree of ‘vividness’; in the caseof ‘cerebral celebrity’, the gradedness is already given; and in the last example,the strength of the relation may perhaps lie in some (suitably defined) degree of ‘dominance’ of the described state. Admittedly, to say that these other analysesare in those contexts acceptable does not entail that they are also preferable to the‘default’ analysis in terms of introspectibility. This will have to be decided in eachcase separately. At any rate, the analysis of Φ lies somewhat beyond the scope of




this thesis, since it will not be relevant for our antiphysicalist argument.Out of the three questions listed at the beginning of this section, the third

one (“Question III”) has so far been left untouched, but it will play a ratherprominent role in the next chapter. Yet already at this point, it may be notedthat, in the light of the above analysis of the accessibility relation, that questioncan quite conveniently be reformulated. Since we have seen that what makes the

data centre for an important part on a cognitive system is my adjunction to thesame, it may instead also be asked why I am adjoined to something as ‘special’ asa cognitive system .23

23This ‘specialness’ is further enhanced by the relatively high level of complexity of this partic-ular cognitive system (compared, e.g., with that of an insect), and perhaps by other propertiesas well. For the sake of simplicity, however, I will continue to talk as if the specialness of the partof the universe I am adjoined to were exhausted by its being (or at least, including) a cognitivesystem. As for what is meant here by ‘special’, see below, sect. 4.2.



Chapter 4

Subjectivity and Physicalism

Looking back on the previous two chapters with their introduction of the epistemo-logical concepts of ‘I’ and subjectivity, it will strike some as strange that nowhere,the name of Kant has been mentioned, who, after all, is the father of the conceptof the transcendental subject ,1 which he distinguishes from the empirical subject

just as sharply as we have distinguished the epistemological concept of subjectivityfrom the empirical notion. The reason for this omission is that it seemed better topresent the ‘derivation’ of those concepts en bloc and free of complicated discus-sions of historical antecedents. For discussions of this kind (especially, complicatedones), we have no space here either, but some brief remarks are inevitable.

First, many authors who (more or less) followed Kant in his conception of the transcendental subject have apparently been impressed by his view that thetranscendental subject could be no “real substance” but only an “ideal substance”(eine Substanz in der Idee),2 and have likewise been at pains to emphasise thattheir respective concepts of a transcendental subject should not be taken to de-note anything real.3 The present approach is obviously different from this. Thesubjects whose existence we have postulated to help us explain why the data arenot all the truths are thereby implicitly postulated to be ontologically real enti-

ties, ‘things in the world’ so-to-speak. The reason for this is simply that, as hasalready been mentioned, every postulation must have some metaphysical import;if epistemological subjects were to be thought of as a purely abstract entities, likenumbers or the empty set, there would be no point in postulating them, for theycould simply be defined .

Second, Kant has conceived his transcendental subject as the origin of the‘unity of apperception’, which is required not only for the unity of consciousnessas a whole but also for the synthesis of the various judgments out of conceptsand representations.4 In our approach, by contrast, the synthesis of judgments isnever touched upon, but this is not meant to suggest that the issue is unimportant(after all, something very similar has for over a decade now been struggled with incognitive neuroscience under the name of ‘the binding problem’). Rather, it is onlyignored here because (a) the problems on which we have focussed instead (mostnotably, the problem of distinguishing the data from other truths) are already

1Halbfass (1998), cf. Kant (1993, B132; B404 (A346)).2Kant (1993, A351)3For example, see Rickert (1902, ch. 2), Husserl (1913), or, for a more recent proponent,

Vendler (1984).4Kant (1993, B137f.). He even suggests (A116) that the unity of consciousness is already

required for all representations, insofar as they are to represent anything – a strikingly modernthought.

65



CHAPTER 4. SUBJECTIVITY AND PHYSICALISM 66

sufficient as a basis of our anti-physicalist argumentation, and (b) because it ishard to see how the ‘synthesis problem’, as we may call it, could pose a problemfor physicalism. It may at this point be asked whether the synthesis problemis not essentially the same as the problem of distinguishing the data from othertruths. For, could not, by just the same means by which truths are combined intoone consciousness, representations likewise be combined into one judgment? The

answer, however, is a clear no. To establish a difference between data and othertruths, nothing more is needed than a relation by which a certain set of truthsare bound to one or more entities. If it were not for the resulting metaphysicalasymmetries, the solution could even have consisted in a fundamentally unary predicate (see sect. 2.4). Things are considerably more complicated in the case of the synthesis problem. For example, let us assume that the judgment, ‘The catchases the dog’ is composed (or ‘synthesised’) out of three representations, whichwe may label, according to their semantic contribution, ‘the cat’, ‘chases’, and ‘thedog’. It can easily be seen that simply grouping them together by inventing a newpredicate F that applies to all of them falls far from the mark, since the resulttells us nothing about who is chased by whom. It is aspects like this that make thesynthesis problem much more difficult to handle than the problem of distinguishingdata from other truths, and therefore, they cannot be appropriately regarded as

essentially the same.We now at last come to the promised argument against physicalism. Its general

structure is quite simple: In the first part, it will be argued that none of theusually supposed candidate properties provided by current physics are suitable foridentification with subjectivity, since all of these are in some way or other graded (cf. 3.1.3).5 This will force the physicalist to adopt the only remaining option,namely, an extremely liberal form of reductionism. Consequently, the second andfinal part will then be concerned with an argument to the effect that such a liberalposition is theoretically unsatisfactory.

One possible objection to the argument should already now be addressed, how-ever. For, patently, the argument as it has just been outlined is directed againstthe claim that physicalism can give a satisfactory account of subjectivity, i.e.,against a reductionist view on subjectivity. But, as we saw in the first chapter,physicalism is a disjunction of reductionism and scepticism , the latter of which isin the context of the philosophy of mind better known as eliminativism . Hence,even if a reductionist view on subjectivity is refuted or otherwise made unattrac-tive, eliminativism still seems to be a viable option. This objection is certainlycorrect insofar as the refutation of eliminativism constitutes an indispensible stepof our antiphysicalist argument. But on the other hand, that refutation does notreally require enough space to make it also a noteworthy step. Eliminativism of subjectivity is, of course, simply the view that there are no subjects. 6 As will berecalled, however, the concept of subjectivity is derived from the concept of data,and refers to the property of being a potential first relatum of the accessibilityrelation. So, to deny the existence of subjects is to claim either that there areno data, or that there is no such thing as accessibility. It will hardly have to be

pointed out that, in the light of the previous two chapters, neither claim appearsto be at all defensible.

5Concerning the meaning of ‘provided by current physics’, see above, p. 10.6Metzinger (2003) is a recent proponent of such a view. Unfortunately, it is not very clear to

me how his claim that there are no such things as subjects is motivated by the rest of his – quiteelaborate – theory of consciousness.




4.1 Gradedness

The arguably most important obstacle to the successful application of a reduc-tionist strategy in the case of subjectivity is the fact that, as shown in sect. 3.1.3,subjectivity is not a graded property, and that, as such, it cannot be identified withany of the candidate properties provided by current physics that would otherwise

suggest themselves. Of course, it would have been remarkable if this argument hadnot in a similar form been proposed before, but even so, the earliest publication inwhich I was able to locate it is David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind . Althoughhe puts the point in a rather forceful way (suggesting that he believes it to be arather strong argument), he spends only one paragraph on it:

[A]ny functionally analyzed concept will have a degree of semanticindeterminacy. Does a mouse have beliefs? Do bacteria learn? Is acomputer virus alive? The best answer to these questions is usually ina sense yes, in a sense no. It all depends on how we draw the bound-aries in the concepts, and in any high-level functional concepts theboundaries will be vague. But compare: Does a mouse have consciousexperience? Does a virus? These are not matters for stipulation. Ei-

ther there is something that it is like to be a mouse or there is not,and it is not up to us to define the mouse’s experience into or outof existence. To be sure, there is probably a continuum of consciousexperience from the very faint to the very rich; but if something hasconscious experience, however faint, we cannot stipulate it away. Thisdeterminacy could not be derived from any functional analysis of theconcepts in the vicinity of consciousness, as the functional concepts inthe vicinity are all somewhat vague. If so, it follows that the notion of consciousness cannot be functionally analyzed.7 (p. 105)

I shall now briefly discuss three proposals for a physicalist identification of subjectivity. The first of these, ‘intelligence’, is not actually a proposal one is likelyto find in the literature, rather than in scientifically naıve thinking. Nevertheless,

I selected it for discussion because of its intuitive appeal. The other two proposals(having ‘higher-order thoughts’ and having globally available states) are, by con-trast, taken from the literature. With regard to these, I should point out that theydo clearly not originally address the specific topic of the physicalistic reduction of subjectivity in the sense in which the concept has been defined in the last chapter;instead, they are, in their original forms, mostly formulated in terms of ‘conscious-ness’, ‘phenomenality’, or ‘first-person perspective’. Still, however, the properties

7There may be some confusion here about the proper understanding of the word ‘functional’.It should, however, be clear from the first lines of this passage that ‘functional’ has to be under-stood in a rather broad way, so that ‘having beliefs’, ‘being capable of learning’, and ‘being alive’all count as functional concepts. Chalmers himself introduces the notion of ‘functional analysis’two paragraphs before the passage just quoted, as follows:

The only analysis of consciousness that seems even remotely tenable for thesepurposes [i.e., the purpose of making consciousness a consequence of a set of physical

facts] is a functional analysis. Upon such an analysis, it would be seen that allthere is to the notion of something’s being conscious is that it should play a certainfunctional role. For example, one might say that all there is to a state’s beingconscious is that it be verbally reportable, or that it be the result of certain kinds of perceptual discrimination, or that it make information available to later processes ina certain way, or whatever. (p. 104f.)

This “whatever” may perhaps be taken to suggest that it will not be too misleading if we interpretthe term ‘functional concept’ in these passages to mean roughly the same as ‘defined in terms of causes and effects’.




that figure in those proposals under the labels of ‘being phenomenally conscious’,‘having a first-person perspective’ etc. can plausibly be assumed to correspondquite closely to our epistemological concept of subjectivity. In any event, I thinkit will have to be agreed that, among the properties provided by current physics,there are hardly any better candidates for the identification with that property.

(a) Intelligence. The kind of property we probably first tend to look for when

asked whether or not subjectivity can be attributed to a given kind of system.When faced with a new kind of object – animal, machine, etc. –, we are quitereluctant to attribute subjectivity to it as long as it does not show any sign of intelligence. But the more intelligence it exhibits (where we are apt to pay par-ticular attention to those intellectual capacities that we recognise as specifically‘human’), the more we are willing to grant it the status of a ‘conscious being’,or of a ‘subject’. The physicalist, concerned with doing justice to this linguisticpractice might decide to identify subjectivity with a certain form of intelligence(or a combination of it with a number of further properties). But when he does so,since intelligence clearly ‘comes in degrees’, he will thereby automatically identifysubjectivity with a graded property. The same goes, evidently, for every other‘performance measure’ we may choose instead of intelligence. The Turing test, forexample, can also be not just passed, but passed by a more or less narrow margin

and with more or less consistency over different trials, and it is clear that thesethings need to be taken into account as well when assessing the ability of a givensystem to ‘pass the Turing test’.

(b) Having higher-order thoughts (HOTs). In the past decade, there havebeen a number of proposals that in effect seek to identify consciousness with theproperty of having thoughts that are in a certain way directed at (i.e., are ‘about’)other mental states of the same system.8 With respect to subjectivity, theseproposals can therefore be taken to suggest that we identify subjectivity with theproperty of having the respective kind of higher-order thoughts. At first, thisproperty might be thought to be rather unproblematically graded. For, on themost plausible accounts, a thought is ‘about’ a given entity by virtue of involvinga representation of that entity, and the question of whether some entity (a state, ora feature of a state, or whatever) somewhere in a brain counts as a representationof some other entity elsewhere is in general not likely to have a determinate clear-cut answer. Usually, one would go about identifying representations in a givenbrain (or any other kind of system) in a rather holistic way, and assign contentsonly after having reached a fairly stable ‘best interpretation’ at least for a sizeablefragment of the system’s representational activities. That is, one would assigncontents to representations much the same way as a field linguist would assignmeanings to the expressions of a newly discovered language. But on such a view,

8E.g., Carruthers (2000); Rosenthal (1997). It should be noted that HOT theorists typicallyformulate their positions in terms of state consciousness, i.e., they focus on the question of what it means for a mental state to be conscious (in the sense in which we say that a thought,desire, perception etc. is a conscious one). But this does clearly not preclude paraphrasing theirpositions in terms of ‘system consciousness’, since, arguably, to say that a system is consciousmeans nothing else than that it is in a conscious state.

Two important distinctions between the various HOT theories concern whether they hold that(a) the higher-order state has to be more of a belief-like or more of a perception-like nature,and (b) whether it is thought that consciousness requires the system in question really to be in ahigher-order state (actualist theories), or whether it is deemed enough if the system is only in someway disposed to be in such a state (dispositionalist theories; with respect to these distinctions, cf.Carruthers (2001)). Fortunately, we need not concern ourselves with these distinctions here. Forsimplicity, I will mostly restrict myself to talking about actualist HOT theories that assume therelevant higher-order states to have a belief-like nature. Our results will be easily transferrableto other kinds of HOT theories.




a higher-order thought has its content only insofar as – i.e., to the degree that –one is justified in assigning that content to it. The property of having higher-orderthoughts would correspondingly seem to be a graded one.

However, although I think the kind of holism just sketched is a perfectly ten-able position on the semantics of mental representations, the issue under discussioncannot be shrugged off quite that easily. The problem is that it is open to HOT

theorists to require that the relation between the higher-order state and its targetbe not simply a general sign-object relation, but something much more special.Recall, for example, the relation between a state and the corresponding introspec-tive (and thus higher-order) belief that I suggested in footnote 10 of chapter 2.There, the target state is conceived of as a component of the higher-order statedirected at it. Clearly, insofar as the HOT theorist restricts the semantic rela-tions between higher-order states and their targets to relations of this sort, therewill, for every such higher-order state, be only one possible interpretation, and theabove argument for the gradedness of HOT-theoretical subjectivity consequentlyloses its force. However, we still have to take into account that, in order to obtaina higher-order state, there is plausibly something needed in addition to the targetstate. According to the suggestion made in the above footnote, this something isthe ‘acknowledgement’ of the target state, i.e., a relation between the correspond-

ing representational system and that state which constitutes the latter’s being‘taken at face value’.

The question, then, is whether this relation of ‘acknowledgement’ (or whateverother relation or property may be needed) is a graded one. Most plausibly, it willhave to be some functionally definable relation, so that a given relation between thesystem and the state in question can be said to constitute an ‘acknowledgement’insofar as – or to the degree that – it satisfies the relevant functional role. There is,of course, the possibility that the ‘acknowledgement’ relation can be very crisplydefined. To give a very crude example just for the sake of illustration, it mighttheoretically be the case that this relation can be defined as follows: a state S isacknowledged if and only if neuron f (S ) fires, where ‘f ’ stands for some to-be-specified function. However, I think there will be agreement that such a definitionis not likely to be forthcoming. The acknowledgement relation may be realisedin such a way for a certain type of systems, but in general, it will have to befunctionally defined, and it seems simply inevitable that a functional role can bemore or less satisfied. Hence, acknowledgement, too, must be a graded relation.

(c) Having states that are ‘globally available’. Perhaps the most plausible prop-erty – among those provided by current physics – with which to identify subjec-tivity is that of being a system whose states (or the informational content of whose states) are at least in part globally available for the rest of the system.9

The correspondence between this property (or something like it) and that of being‘phenomenally conscious’ has been pointed out numerous times in the literature,10

and, when we equate, as seems reasonable, the property of being ‘phenomenallyconscious’ with that of subjectivity, it appears that the main source of plausibilityfor the said identification lies precisely in this correspondence. But is there really a

correspondence between subjectivity and the property of having globally availablestates (as we may abbreviate it)? It may certainly seem so, since the data I knowof – i.e., the truths of which I know that I am entitled in believing them, or, in

9Baars (1997); Chalmers (1997). Dennett (2001) provides a discussion of some of the problemsassociated with a reduction of state consciousness to global availability (cf. p. 33 above). Again,the various refinements that have been proposed for the notion of global availability are notinteresting for our present discussion.10Cf., again, Chalmers (1997).




informal terms: what I know about my consciousness – are always of such a naturethat they may affect my behaviour; for example, in that I am able to talk aboutthem. But this, it could be objected, might also be due to the fact that I know of these data, whereas there may be large amounts of further data that I have notthe slightest idea of. We have already discussed at length (namely, in sect. 3.1.4)why this is not to be regarded as a real possibility, but nevertheless, it might be

true that it is not the datum itself, but only the knowledge about it that leads toits global availability. If this is correct, those data that I am not in a position toknow of – and we cannot completely exclude the possibility that there are suchdata – might not be globally available at all.

Be that as it may, however; the question we are here primarily interested inis whether having globally available states constitutes a graded property. And,clearly enough, it does: simply because global availability is a graded propertyitself, as may be seen from the fact that brain-states can be more or less globallyavailable.

It seems, then, that every property that would suggest itself for the physicalistidentification of subjectivity is a graded one. Since, however, subjectivity cannotbe a graded property (as we have seen in the previous chapter), it follows thatnone of these ‘obvious candidates’ is, in fact, eligible. Let us therefore now turn

to the less obvious ones.

4.2 Liberal Reductionism

Faced on the one hand with the unacceptability of eliminativism and, on theother, with the unidentifiability of subjectivity with any graded property, the onlyremaining option for the physicalist is to search for some un graded property withwhich to identify subjectivity. The natural direction of such a search is apparently‘outward’, i.e., from the initially favoured properties (intelligence, having higher-order states, etc.) to ever more general ones, in the hope that one may soon finda suitable candidate. The reason for this direction of search is that the oppositedirection, moving to more and more specific properties, does simply not seem very

promising in point of eliminating gradedness. It is difficult to provide a formalargument for this, but I think the point will at least become plausible if we look atit in the following way: By moving towards more specific properties, we are as itwere adding further specifications to our current description of the property; so, if the description already contains a component that is responsible for the gradednessof the property, we can therefore not be expected to get rid of that gradedness bymaking the property more specific. By contrast, moving to less specific propertiescan typically be seen as simplifying the description of the property in question(I am assuming that we need not consider disjunctive properties here), whichis clearly comparable to eliminating any components from that description thatentail gradedness.

So, the apparently only reasonable course for the physicalist will be to makethe property with which he intends to identify subjectivity less specific. However,

regardless of where we start, it seems that not much will be left once the ‘gradedcomponents’ are eliminated. For example, starting with intelligence, the next lessspecific ungraded property would almost seem to be the trivial property of being an entity , were it not for the fact that, from a physicalist perspective, the propertyof being intelligent is the same as the property of being an intelligent (physical)system . The same holds for the other properties considered: Having higher-orderthoughts can be equated with being a physical system having such thoughts, and




having globally available states is arguably the same as being a system with suchstates. It appears, then, that what we have to consider is the property of being a system . If this property turns out to be ungraded, it might be a suitable candidatefor the identification of subjectivity. Analogous considerations for other physicalistproperties (having higher-order states, having states that are globally available)arguably lead to the same result. The question the physicalist has to address,

then, is whether or not the property of being a system is a graded one.Luckily for him, it seems that indeed a case can be made that that property is

not graded, so that his search has turned out a plausible candidate at least in thisrespect. For, if we define the property of being a system (physical or not) on thebasis of the concept of causal connectednes, such that something is a system justin case the causal connectedness among its parts is greater than its connectednesswith anything outside of it, then it is, of course, still true that the difference can besmaller or greater, but at least, it does not seem arbitrary to draw the line at zero,i.e., exactly where the internal connectedness exceeds the strength of every externalconnection. On this basis, a physical system could then be defined as a systemthat exists in one or more of the ontologies compatible with current physics.11

This suggested definition of physical systemhood is clearly a very rough-hewn one,and much in need of refinement, but an intuitive understanding will suffice for our

purposes.Now, if the physicalist equates subjectivity with the property of being a system

in this sense, it has to be asked with what relation he then identifies the accessibil-ity relation. After all, subjectivity is still formally defined as the property of beinga potential first relatum of that relation. Since, however, we have also alreadyanalysed accessibility as a combination of adjunction and the graded Φ-relation,it will be more practical to start by asking how the physicalist might reasonablyinterpret those relations. As has already been hinted at in the previous chapter,adjunction would apparently have to be equated with the identity relation. Sinceadjunction is the relation between a subject and its cognitive system, and since thephysicalist will regard as subjects hardly anything else but cognitive systems, thisseems to be the only plausible possibility. As for the Φ-relation, it will be mostreasonable to choose something like Dennett’s ‘cerebral celebrity’, i.e., a gradedrelation between systems and states, whose strength equals the influence of therespective state within the system in question. Ideally, this interpretation of theΦ-relation would be coupled with an account of introspection where the same vari-able figures as the system’s awareness of the respective states. If such an accountcould be made to work, the analysed version of the Knowledge Intuition (whichwould in this case read: ‘I know the most important part of the truths Φ-relatedto me’) would be automatically true in the context of every system. To be sure,it is not quite appropriate to say that a thermostat, for instance, ‘knows’ aboutits internal states. But on the other hand, it is, I think, not too far-fetched tosuppose that at least for those systems that can be said to have the concept of ‘data’ – which, as pointed out in the previous chapter, presupposes at least someintrospective capacity –, the states that are most influential in these systems are

also known by them. It would certainly be strange if a system’s introspectionwould fail to register, of all things, the most influential states of that system. So,there is definitely hope that the physicalist position makes the analysed version of the Knowledge Intuition true in every context where the concept of data can beconceived.

The physicalistic position we now have before us states that every physical

11This is meant to yield the result that the property of being a physical system is itself aphysical property.




system is a subject, and that for every state instantiated in such a system, acorresponding truth is more or less accessible to that subject. It hardly needs tobe pointed out that this position, which I would like to call ‘Liberal Reductionism’,is a rather unfamiliar one, since every single system – plant, bacterium, molecule– is considered to be a subject.12 This is certainly not a position anyone wouldwant to adopt who is not forced to it. However, for all the considerations of this

section have so far shown, the physicalist is forced to adopt such a position, orone very much like it. Can we conclude, then, that we have just completed areductio ad absurdum of physicalism, or do we have to take liberal reductionismmore seriously? I think that only the latter is correct. Liberal Reductionism maybe extremely unattractive to common-sense, but this might only be due to itsstrangeness. Although I agree with common-sense that Liberal Reductionism iswrong, it is not obviously wrong, and regardless of how wrong I think it is, all Ican show is merely that it is theoretically unsatisfactory .

It is quite conceivable that Liberal Reductionism, if anyone were to take itseriously in the first place, would be rejected on the basis of various kinds of badarguments. It is therefore fortunate that, unlike the falsity of this position, theweaknesses of those arguments are rather obvious. For example, many will reject itbecause they think it is clear that thermostats, molecules etc. ‘are not conscious’.

However, what is clear is only that we have no evidence that those things ‘areconscious’. We may not like the idea that there is something ‘it is like’ to be athermostat or a molecule, but insofar as this is merely due to the fact that we arenot used to this idea, we should simply try to get rid of such prejudices. Anotherreason why Liberal Reductionism may be deemed problematic lies in the belief that it is a ‘metaphysically extravagant’ position. This reason, however, wouldbe even more obviously mistaken. It is true that the position can be seen as akind of panpsychism (i.e., the view that consciousness is ubiquitous in nature),and that practically all historical forms of panpsychism are by modern standardsquite extravagant. But this does certainly not apply to Liberal Reductionism,which, after all, is still a form of reductionism (as specified in sect. 1.2) and thusmetaphysically conservative, at least insofar as current physics can be regarded asmetaphysically conservative. So, whatever may be wrong with this position, thearguments against it must be based on different sorts of considerations.

The in my view only remotely successful way to argue against Liberal Reduc-tionism is to criticise its inability to provide a satisfactory answer to Question III,i.e., its inability satisfactorily to explain why I am adjoined to something as ‘spe-cial’ as a cognitive system (cf. above, p. 64). This inability of Liberal Reductionismseems to me straightforwardly evident from a common-sense point of view, espe-cially in the light of the fact that according to that position, practically everymolecule counts as a subject. Correspondingly, I also think that it is just thisinability that accounts for our strong reluctance against that position. From aphilosophical point of view, however, the above statement (namely, that LiberalReductionism is unable satisfactorily to explain why I am adjoined to somethingas ‘special’ as a cognitive system) urgently requires clarification, and in more than

one respect. In particular, it provokes the following two questions:(1) We said that according to Liberal Reductionism, adjunction is identity: I

am my cognitive system. But is it not absurd require an explanation for thefact that something is the same as itself? What could such an explanationlook like?

12‘Rampantly Liberal Reductionism’ might actually be more appropriate; but I decided to usethe shorter expression.




(2) What is meant by ‘special’ ? Is it not much too vague to play such a crucialrole in this argument?

To start with (1), it certainly has to be conceded that it usually does not makemuch sense to require an explanation for an identity relationship – even if the thingin question is given under two different descriptions. That the Morning Star is

identical to the Evening Star, for example, is a fact for which there simply cannotbe any further explanation. But it would be wrong to suppose that this is peculiarto the identity relation. Evidently, what makes the demand for an explanationabsurd in this case is the fact that to be identical to something is an individuating property : that the entity in question would not be itself if it did not have thatproperty. Being identical to the Evening Star is such a property, but the propertyof being a star simpliciter is equally individuating. Nor need such properties be inany way non-relational. If two electrons, for instance, are different only in virtueof their different location in space, and if spatial location is determined solely byrelationships of spatial distance to other entities (as Leibniz had assumed), thenthe property of being so-and-so far away from a given other entity would also bean individuating property. And the same may well be true of the property of beingadjoined to a given other entity, regardless of whether adjunction is the same as

identity or not. So, the liberal-reductionist identification of the adjunction relationwith identity does not buy us any more than would be gained by any positionaccording to which adjunction-based properties are individuating.

Still, one may think that it is equally absurd to demand an explanation for thefact that I am adjoined to a cognitive system, if adjunction is indeed the same asidentity, as it would be to demand an explanation for the identity of Morning Starand Evening Star. In fact, however, it is not absurd. The need for an explanationarises simply from the fact that, under the assumption of Liberal Reductionism,I would never have expected that I, conceived of as the subject constituting thepresent context of evaluation , am adjoined to (or identical with) a cognitive system.For, since according to Liberal Reductionism every physical system is a subject, itwould have been vastly more likely if I had turned out to be a magnesium atom, forinstance. This may again sound absurd, because magnesium atoms are patently

unable to reason about such things. But this would miss the point. What is atissue is clearly not that I, conceived of as the subject that is – vicariously or not –thinking these thoughts, am (adjoined to) a cognitive system, but rather that thesubject constituting this context is. The same line of reasoning would thus also bevalid in the context of a cognitive beneficiary of an underdeveloped or functionallyimpaired brain. Or, to put it in a less technical way: a child (for instance) who isunable to grasp the argument would nevertheless be entitled to it.

It could now be objected that my being adjoined to a cognitive system is justa coincidence that I simply have to accept. But can this be correct? Consider theevent that I throw a thousand dice and each of them comes to rest with a threefacing upwards. To be sure, this would not contradict the assumption that thedice are fair. It would, however, strongly prompt us to look for an explanationof this outcome – it would make us suspect that there must be something about

the dice that makes them turn up a three with a much higher probability thanany other number (or, perhaps, some influence that leads to their turning upthe same number, whatever it may be). Similarly, the fact that I am adjoinedto a cognitive system raises, I would argue, the suspicion that there must besomething that results in a tendency among subjects to be adjoined to cognitivesystems. A believable hypothesis as to how such a tendency may be broughtabout would be the “explanation” I have been talking about above. Since Liberal




Reductionism does obviously not afford such an explanation, it would follow thatit is correspondingly unsatisfactory.

Admittedly, assessing the appropriate level of suspicion about a given outcome– the confidence with which one should believe that there must be a deeper ex-planation to it, and that it is not to be shrugged off as a mere coincidence – isnot an exact science, but seems to be largely a matter of theoretical instinct. If a

dice-throw with 1000 dice yields 1000 threes, this will rightly rise suspicion; but if the outcome had been that (supposing the dice are numbered) die #1 had turnedup a 2, die #2 a 5, die #3 a 1, and so on, with some random assignment of num-bers to dice, it would have passed as completely unspectacular, even though thisparticular outcome would have been just as unlikely as a thousand threes. Theonly reason for this difference that I can think of is the fact that an outcome of 1000 threes vaguely suggests that a relatively simple explanation is available, suchas, e.g., the hypothesis that every face of every die is a three. I say a ‘relativelysimple explanation’ because it is not that there is a lack of explanation. We do,after all, not miss an explanation in the case of the random outcome either: theexplanation we imagine to be applicable in that case would be a certain, verycomplicated story about the initial positions of the dice and their motions whenthrown. Just the same kind of story could be told in the case of the 1000 threes,

but still, we think there must be another explanation, a simpler one. The reasonwhy we expect such a simpler explanation lies evidently in the relative simplicityof the outcome. An outcome of 1000 threes kann be described in very few words,whereas, to describe a random outcome to the same degree of detail, the numberswould typically have to be written down one by one.

Now, the outcome that I am adjoined to a cognitive system arguably differsfrom that of the 1000 threes in that it does on the whole not afford a simplerdescription than the contrasting cases. The reason why we expect an explanationfor it must therefore lie in something else than its simplicity. What instead suggeststhat there is an explanation for that outcome seems to be the ‘specialness’ of cognitive systems. This specialness consists essentially in the fact that cognitivesystems – and in particular the human kind of cognitive system I am adjoined to –are situated on the higher end of what one might call the ‘spectrum of intelligence’,where by ‘intelligence’, I mean the degree to which something is able to perceiveand understand the world. With respect to this ability, humans notoriously surpassevery other known kind of entity,13 and moreover, there is also a certain conceptualrelationship between this ability and subjectivity: That I am a subject makes itpossible that truths are accessible to me; one could think of this as a primitiveway to be connected to the world. But if I am, in addition, adjoined to a cognitivesystem , I am also able to analyse and interpret the data, and make inferences as towhat other things there are. It does not seem too far-fetched to view this additionalability as a strengthening of my connection to the world, already prefigured in mybeing a subject. Certainly, it would be desirable for this relationship betweenbeing a subject on the one hand and being adjoined to a cognitive system on theother hand to be spelt out in furhter detail, but it should not surprise us that our

theoretical instinct is often guided by rather vague notions. I think one will atleast agree on the significance of this relationship if one realises that without it,the present argument would be open to the following kind of parodying objection:

If I were adjoined to a can-opener , I would be entitled to just the

13Known to humans, of course, but how much of a limitation this entails remains to be seen.For what it is worth, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has so far seen very little success,and the case for the existence of paranormal intelligent beings (such as demons etc.) is alsorather doubtful.




same argument, to the effect that there must be a tendency amongsubjects to be adjoined to can-openers. For, this kind of entity isclearly superior to all others when it comes to can-opening ability.

The only missing premiss would, indeed, be an appropriate relationship betweenbeing a subject and “can-opening ability”. Since there patently is no such rela-

tionship, the parody does not work, and the objection fails.Because of the said specialness of cognitive systems (and in particular of highly-evolved cognitive systems), there seems to be justified hope that my being adjoinedto such a system can be correctly explained by a tendency among subjects towards“stronger connections to the world” in the sense adumbrated in the previous para-graph, i.e., a tendency that in effect increases the number of subjects adjoinedto ‘intelligent’ cognitive systems.14 That there is hope for such an explanationdoes, of course, not mean that we can already rule out Liberal Reductionism onthe grounds that it is unable to provide that explanation. It only means that wemay assume that position to be wrong until we find strong reasons for believingthat there is no such explanation, after all, and that it is really just a coincidencethat I am adjoined to a cognitive system. And again, it should be pointed outthat we are here mostly following our theoretical instinct. It is this ‘instinct’ (or

however else one might choose to call it) that tells us that we can expect thereto be an explanation for our being adjoined to cognitive systems, even though itis rather unclear how much this expectation can be justified on the basis of logicand probability theory, or whether it has to be justified on that basis in order tobe justified at all. This issue is strongly related to the subtle and much-discussedquestion of whether inferences to the best explanation can stand on their own ormust, instead, rely on something else (such as probability theory) in order to countas justified.15 Since we obviously cannot deal with this question here, it will haveto suffice if we merely conclude that Liberal Reductionism seems to be wrong andthat we should therefore (in a spirit of pragmatic optimism, perhaps) assume thatit is wrong as long as there is still hope for an explanation for our being adjoinedto cognitive systems.

Consequently, physicalism itself should be assumed to be wrong as long as

there is such hope, since we have above seen that the physicalist is forced to adoptLiberal Reductionism in order to do justice to the non-gradedness of subjectivity.

4.3 Conclusion

This, then, is the argument. As is easily noticed, it mainly consists in two theses.First, the non-gradedness of subjectivity: without it, we might just as well acceptone of the physicalist analyses considered in sect. 4.1. Second, the thesis that there

14More precisely, what is increased is of course the ratio of this number to the number of all subjects. Or, as one might also say: the ratio m/n, where m is the number of contextsin which the proposition ‘I am a subject adjoined to a cognitive system’ is true, and n thenumber of contexts where ‘I am a subject’ is true (i.e., the number of all subjects). Since thisratio strongly resembles the way probabilities are computed for equal distributions – namely, bycomputing ratios between numbers of cases –, and since contexts form the indexical dimensionof our above semantical framework, one might well call this ratio the indexical probability forthe proposition ‘I am adjoined to a cognitive system’ under the condition that the respective‘I’ is a subject. (Besides, since the projected explanation works by providing a hypothesis thatleads to an increased estimate of this probability, we may correspondingly call it an indexical

explanation. In a more or less analogous way, one can also develop the notions of metaphysical and epistemic explanation, but this will best be left for another occasion.)15For proponents of the former view, see e.g. Harman (1986); Lycan (1988).




‘data’(2.1)

‘I’ and ‘accessibility’

(2.3)

‘subjectivity’

(3.1.1)

‘adjunction’

(3.5)

Subjectivity is not

a graded property.

(3.1.3)

Failure of commonphysicalist analyses.

(4.1)

Liberal Reductionismis unsatisfactory.

(4.2)

Physicalism is

unsatisfactory.

(4.2)

Figure 4.1: The general structure of the argument and its conceptual basis. Num-bers in parentheses indicate the sections in which the respective concepts or theses

have been introduced.

is justified hope for an explanation of the fact that the data centre on a highly-evolved cognitive system, which fact has been analysed as our being adjoined tosuch a system: if this hope were unjustified, we might just as well embrace LiberalReductionism. For illustration, the rough structure of this argument, togetherwith the ‘genealogy’ of the most essential underlying concepts, is represented infigure 4.1. The diagram shows four points on which the argument is most likely tobe criticised: First, the basis of the whole edifice, the concept of data; second, thethesis that subjectivity is not a graded property; third, the part of the argumentthat is intended to show that Liberal Reductionism should be assumed to be wrong;and fourth, the thesis that, if physicalists are to do justice to the non-gradedness

of subjectivity, they are forced to adopt Liberal Reductionism. Let us deal withthese points in turn.

4.3.1 Possible Objections

We have, of course, already dealt with a number of objections to the concept of data(sect. 2.2). Yet it may be that a certain reluctance against it persists. If so, prob-ably the main reason for this will be either a certain tension with Wittgenstein’s




private language argument (which we chose to ignore) or its near-homonomy withthe term ‘sense-datum’ and the latter’s constant unpopularity among philosophers.I do not think, however, that the concept of data, as it has here been conceived,contains anything a clear-headed opponent of sense-data philosophies should findobjectionable. Data are not ‘mental entities’. Instead of populating consciousness,they only describe it; and there will be no question that, if consciousness exists,

it will also be, at least in its own terms, describable. If the reason for the reluc-tance against data lies in the fact that data are conceived of as propositions, andas such for some reason considered to be not ‘austere’ or ‘ontologically innocent’enough, it almost seems the discussion has to stop here. I suppose, though, thatthose who argue in this way would be more content if data were conceived of assentences. But then there should be no problem, since propositions can very wellbe construed as equivalence classes of sentences.

A second potential point of attack would be the claim that subjectivity is anon-graded property. I think it has been fairly conclusively shown in sect. 3.1.3that subjectivity, as we have defined it, is not a graded property. To recapitulate,if subjectivity were graded, there would have to be some underlying practicallycontinuous variable such that the entities on one end of the spectrum are subjectswhereas those on the other end are not. This, in turn, would require an arbitrary

(though more or less fuzzy) line to be drawn somewhere along this spectrum. Fromthe derivation of the concept of subjectivity, however, it can be seen that no de-cisions to that effect have been taken. Moreover, it was also argued that no suchdecisions should be taken with respect to the semantics of ‘subjectivity’, as thiswould clearly impair the metaphysical significance of the concept. A concept of subjectivity that rests on arbitrary decisions would simply not be ‘the real thing’.So, it was argued that subjectivity is not only not graded under our definition,but also that this is as it should be. The only way I can see to counter this argu-ment would be to present an alternative (and of course graded ) property as ‘truesubjectivity’, whereas our concept would then be dismissed as some meaninglessconstruct. But the only basis on which this kind of argument could be basedwould apparently consist in intuitions on what it means to be a subject (or to‘have a first-person perspective’, etc.). And here again, it is difficult to see howsuch an argument could succeed. First of all, any conception according to whichsubjectivity is a graded property is already counter-intuitive to begin with.16 Andmoreover, the connection of our concept of subjectivity to the associated intuitionshas been at length discussed in sect. 3.1.2. Given this, it would surely not be easyfor a physicalist to produce a more intuitive concept of subjectivity that defines itas a graded property.

Considerably more problematic than the case for the non-gradedness of subjectivity is our argument, in the previous section, against Liberal Reductionism.According to it, the ‘special’ conceptual connection between the property of beingadjoined to a (relatively highly-evolved) cognitive system on the one hand andthe property of being a subject on the other makes it seem likely that there is adeeper reason for the fact that I, a subject, am adjoined to such a system. Because

Liberal Reductionism is patently unable to provide such a reason (as it takes everyphysical system to be a subject), we concluded that we could assume its falsityas long as there is still hope that such a ‘reason’ – i.e., an explanation – can be

16The above quote by Chalmers (p. 67) brings this out very well: “Either there is somethingthat it is like to be a mouse or there is not, and it is not up to us to define the mouse’s experienceinto or out of existence. To be sure, there is probably a continuum of conscious experience fromthe very faint to the very rich; but if something has conscious experience, however faint, wecannot stipulate it away.”




provided. Put more briefly, we concluded that Liberal Reductionism is ‘unsatisfac-tory’. As has repeatedly been emphasised, however, the belief that an explanationis forthcoming is so far motivated only by ‘theoretical instinct’ (or ‘intuition’, asone might also say). This does not automatically invalidate the argument; after all,much scientific reasoning is not exclusively based on logic and probability theoryeither, but also quite crucially turns on considerations of simplicity and theoretical

elegance, i.e., it involves ‘inferences to the best explanation’. These can (at leastapparently) not be justified on the basis of logic and probability theory alone. Butif they are justified – and science would certainly not have come very far withoutthem – it seems plausible enough to suppose that ‘inferences to the more promisingposition’ are also justified, insofar as ‘promising’ means: offering hope of a betterexplanation. In our case, this ‘more promising position’ was the assumption thatLiberal Reductionism is false.

Still, it is very much an open issue whether such inference should count as justified. Therefore, this would be the point where I would try to attack if Iwere a physicalist. On the other side, however, a physicalist who attacks theabove argument against Liberal Reductionism while accepting the other points of our argument will thereby in effect endorse Liberal Reductionism. I am not surewhether many physicalists would be happy with this consequence, but if they are

not, it would be very interesting to know why.The fourth and final point of attack consists in the thesis that a physicalist

who takes the non-gradedness of subjectivity seriously will have no other optionthan to adopt Liberal Reductionism. This route may seem the most tempting to aphysicalist, since all he has to do is to present a non-graded physical property thatcan be plausibly identified with subjectivity. The problem, of course, is that it iscompletely unclear (at least to me) what this property could be. The physicalistmight reply that I, as an anti-physicalist, face exactly the same problem, sinceI have not so far presented any (non-physical) property with which to identifysubjectivity. Yet these two sides are not equal. Given acceptance of the non-gradedness of subjectivity, the physicalist has to hold that subjectivity can beidentified with a non-graded physical property. Since, to my knowledge, no suchproperty has so far been proposed, and since no potential candidate comes to mindeither, it will be fair to assume that there does not seem to be any such property.There still may be one, to be sure, but the burden of this proof lies squarely onthe side of the physicalist. The fact that I have so far not presented any non-physical alternatives is therefore relatively unimportant – even though it has to beadmitted that a plausible non-physical analysis of subjectivity would clearly helpto strengthen the anti-physicalist position.

4.3.2 Phenomenal Judgments

Besides the antiphysicalist argument itself, a considerable portion of this thesishas been dedicated to the effort of protecting the argument from the Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment. Whenever an antiphysicalist position or argument is tobe based on judgments about things that can supposedly not be accommodatedon the basis of current physics, whereas the judgments themselves can – as seemsplausible – very well be explained on that basis, there is always the question of howthose judgments might be justified. We have argued in sect. 1.4 that, insofar asthose judgments are observational and interpreted in an antiphysicalist way, theycannot be regarded as justified unless there is some independent reason to believethat the states of affairs they are interpreted as reporting are causally relevantfor them. This is a fact that many antiphysicalist positions that are based on




(antiphysicalistically interpreted) phenomenal judgments fail to take into account.In connection with our own considerations, we approached the Paradox by firstasking how the Knowledge Intuition could be true, i.e., how it is that I knowthe most important part of the truths accessible to me. We answered this bymaking the Knowledge Intuition a part of the possession conditions of the conceptof data (and thereby of accessibility), but this alone was not enough to protect

us from the Paradox. The problem was only shifted from ‘How can I know themost important part of the data?’ to: ‘How can I be sure that my analysis of the accessibility relation will honour the fact that I do know the most importantpart of the data?’ It was a shift from the epistemic to the semantic aspect of theParadox.

We essentially solved this problem by providing an analysis of the accessibilityrelation that was acceptable in every context and divided the relation up into twoparts, namely adjunction and Φ. Of these, only Φ is subject to different analysesin the contexts of different subjects. The adjunction relation, by contrast, must beanalysed in the same way in the context of every subject; it is this relation by virtueof which subjects are ‘beneficiaries’ of a cognitive system. Hence, it was guaranteedthat we could consistently maintain an antiphysicalist analysis of the adjunctionrelation (even if not of accessibility as a whole), and it was consequently on this

issue that we would eventually have to argue against physicalism. Consequently,while our critique of Liberal Reductionism in the previous section was primarilyan argument against the identification of subjectivity with the property of being aphysical system, it was at the same time also directed against an identification of adjunction with the identity relation. And necessarily so, since every subject is apotential first relatum of accessibility and thereby also of the adjunction relation.

Now, with respect to the question of whether our phenomenal judgments are justified when interpreted antiphysicalistically, does our argument provide an in-dependent reason to believe that the states of affairs they report are also causallyrelevant for them? Apparently, yes; but we have to be careful with respect towhat kind of antiphysicalist interpretation of phenomenal judgments is warrantedby our argument. What we have argued in the previous sections was that sub-

jectivity cannot satisfactorily be identified with a physical property (i.e., with aproperty definable in terms of current physics), and this result plausibly gives usa reason for believing that in fact, subjectivity is not a physical property. Can weinfer from this that accessibility and adjunction are non-physical properties, too?It does not seem so; for it is at least conceivable that current physics provides allthat is needed to define a certain relation, but not the properties required of therelation’s potential first relata. So, given an observational phenomenal judgmentJ that, on a self-referential interpretation, reports a truth T about my cognitivesystem, I can only in the following way construct an antiphysicalist interpretationof it under which it is still justified: Since I have reason to believe that subjectivityis a non-physical property (as we just said), and since, due to the possession con-ditions associated with that concept, I have to regard T as a datum and thus as atruth accessible to some subject (namely, to me), I also have reason to believe that

T is accessible to something that instantiates a non-physical property. This, then,enables me to see J as indicating the further proposition just mentioned, namely,that T is accessible to something that instantiates a non-physical property. Inother words, it is now possible for me to regard that proposition – call it ‘P ’ – asthe content of J . Because P makes reference to a non-physical property, this willconstitute an antiphysicalist interpretation of J , and from the way we constructedit, it follows that J is also justified under this interpretation.

I would like to close with some less technical remarks on the consequences to




be drawn from our above discussions.

4.3.3 Future Directions

Having developed an argument against physicalism based of the concept of subjectivity, where do we stand now with respect to the mind-body problem? It may

be recalled from the first chapter that physicalism can be seen as the disjuction(so-to-speak) of the first two ‘directions’ that a solution of that problem can take,namely, scepticism and reductionism. Since both of these were either ruled out inthe course of our argument (p. 66) or shown to be unsatisfactory (sect. 4.2), thisleaves us with the three other directions: revisionism, property dualism, and sub-stance dualism. As was pointed out already in sect. 1.2, this is the order in whichthese approaches should be considered, as revisionism is in general more theoreti-cally conservative than property dualism and property dualism more theoreticallyconservative than substance dualism. So, if scepticism is wrong and reductionismunsatisfactory, the next best guess will be revisionism.

One of the reasons why I am stressing this fact here is that apparently, nofull-blown revisionist theories of the mind have so far been proposed. Indeed, anti-physicalists seem in general not even to be aware of the option, and have instead

tended to follow property-dualist or substance-dualist approaches. This may inrecent decades have begun to change somewhat, as certain ‘strange’ aspects of modern physics and their possible ‘implications’ for the mind-body problem havemoved more into the centre of public awareness.17 As far as I know, however, thismovement has so far not engendered much in the way of well-developed proposals.Moreover, one of the main motivations for property dualism and perhaps alsofor substance dualism seems to stem from the intuition that our observationalphenomenal judgments make reference to certain non-physical properties (alsoknown as qualia ) – and this intuition has, as I hope, been revealed to be deeplyproblematic by our above discussions of the Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment.Assuming that there are no other successful arguments against physicalism thanthe one presented here, the apparently only antiphysicalist interpretation underwhich our phenomenal judgments are justified can be called antiphysicalist only

insofar as it takes the judgments in question to refer to the non-physical propertyof subjectivity (see sect. 4.3.2).

It is clearly an exciting question how the deeper metaphysical nature of adjunc-tion and subjectivity might be constituted. If revisionism is indeed correct, theseconcepts would have to be in such a way integrated into one of the world-views of current physics that they do not form mere additions (as they would in a dualistontology), but instead are ‘fused’ with certain existing, though perhaps stronglymodified, physical concepts. This will certainly not be an easy task, but the diffi-culty also has its advantages. After all, what motivates us to attempt this task isonly insufficiently described as ‘theoretical conservatism’. It would be more appro-priate to speak instead of ‘ontological parsimony’ and ‘theoretical elegance’; mereconservatism is only what distinguishes the scepticist from the reductionist. Theconstraints imposed on our theorising by the existing structures of physical theorymay be difficult to meet, but without them, our theorising would have nothing tohold onto. We should therefore rather be grateful for those constraints, as long asrevisionism still holds some promise for an explanation of our being adjoined tocognitive systems (according to sect. 4.2). If it should turn out that no revisionisttheory can provide such an explanation, there seem to be two options: either toresign ourselves to the inavailability of the desired explanation and consequently

17For example, cf. Penrose (1994).




adopt Liberal Reductionism (or something like it); or to accept dualism. In theformer case, hardly anything more will have to be said: adjunction will be identity,subjectivity more or less the property of being a physical system, and ‘conscious-ness studies’ merely another name of cognitive neuropsychology. If we were toaccept dualism, by contrast, hardly anything more could be said. For by sepa-rating ‘subjectivity’ from physical concepts, the constraints previously provided

by physical theories will cease to apply. As a result, explanations of our beingadjoined to cognitive systems may then no longer be very hard to construct, butdue to their lack of connection with the rest of our theories, they will be reducedto free-wheeling speculations, and there might be little warrant for believing anyof them.

Suppose revisionism is not able to afford the desired explanation: which of thosetwo paths should one take? This is an interesting question not just in the caseof the failure of revisionism. It points to the much more general (and apparentlyquite difficult) methodological issue of how much theoretical elegance one shouldbe willing to sacrifice for the sake of explaining a given set of facts. This issue willalmost certainly have to be addressed already with respect to revisionism itself;for revisionist theories, too, can vary widely in regard to elegance. So, even if a revisionist theory can be constructed that offers an explanation of our being

adjoined to cognitive systems, there will, if the theory is less elegant than theoriginal physical theory, still be the question of whether the explanation justifiesthat loss of elegance. As long as no answer to this question is in sight, the anti-physicalist’s best hope will be to work towards a theory that not only entails atendency among subjects to be adjoined to cognitive systems, but that is also at least as elegant as the best physical theory available. This is certainly a dauntingtask.



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