What is it like to see a bat? A critique of Dretske’s representationalist theory of qualia

This paper critiques the representationalist account of qualia, focussing on the Representational Naturalism presented by Fred Dretske in Naturalizing the Mind. After laying out Dretske’s theory of qualia and making clear its externalist consequences, I argue that Dretske’s definition is either too liberal or runs into problems defending its requirements, in particular ‘naturalness’ and ‘mentalness.’ I go on to show that Dretske’s account of qualia falls foul of the argument from misperception in such a way that Dretske must either admit that his kind of qualia have nothing at all to do with what mental life subjectively feels like, or that veridical perception involves qualia and misperception does not. One of the main problems in the philosophy of mind is what is sometimes called the qualia problem. Qualia are the ‘felt’ or ‘phenomenal’ qualities associated with experiences, such as the viewing of a colour, the feeling of a pain, or the hearing of a sound. They are sometimes thought of as special properties of certain of our mental states that give those states a certain ‘feel’ — to know ‘what it is like’ to have an experience (in Thomas Nagel’s phrase) is, traditionally, to know its qualia. The problem of qualia can be thought of as the attempt to reconcile such properties with a broadly scientific, physicalist outlook. Unless qualia can somehow be naturalized, it looks very much as if their existence is incompatible with the truth of physicalism. It is not at all clear how the painfulness of pain or the vivid redness of the visual sensation of a ripe apple are to be explained physically, for example. It is hard to see how those properties which make such experiences feel the way they do and not some other way, could be physical properties. One modern response to the problem of qualia is to abandon physicalism and adopt, instead, a form of property dualism, admitting