A Materialist Believe in Qualia ?

Should a materialist believe in qualia? Yes and no. 'Qual ia ' is a name for the occupants of a certain functional role that is spelled out in our tacitly known folk psychology. If materialism is true, there are no perfect occupants of the role, and hence no perfect deservers of the name. But in all probability there are imperfect occupants of the role, imperfect deservers of the name. Good enough deservers of the name? May they just be called 'qual ia '? I say yes. But I take this to be a case of semantic indecision. There is no settled answer to the question 'how good is good enough?' . In part, maybe, it is a political question. The foe (or friend) of materialism who wants to make it out to be something radical and bizarre is ent i t led to say that material is t ' qua l i a ' are bogus, ersatz qualia; whereas a conservative materialist like me may say with equal right that qualia exist but are not quite as we take them to be? 'Qual ia ' i sn ' t a term of ordinary language. Neither is 'phenomenal character' nor ' raw feel ' nor 'subjective quality' . 'What i t 's l ike' or 'how it seems' are ordinary enough but when used as terms for qualia, they are used in a special technical sense. You can say what i t ' s like to taste New Zealand beer by saying what experience you have when you do, namely a sweet taste. But you can ' t say what i t 's like to have a sweet taste in the parallel way, namely by saying that when you do, you have a sweet taste! Yet despite the lack of a folksy word or phrase, I still say that the concept of qualia is somehow built into folk psychology. My reason is that when philosophers tell us very concisely indeed what they mean by 'qual ia ' , we catch on. I think they never say enough to introduce the concept from scratch to someone who doesn't already have it (whether or not he has the qualia themselves). But maybe they do say enough to serve as a reminder to someone who has the concept already, even if he has it in some inexplicit way. Now I wil l say what I think the folk-psychological concept and hence the definitive role of qualia is. Preliminaries: I will say experiences when I mean particular events of experiencing. These events are havings of experiential states, which are had repeatedly at different t imes and by different people. These repeatable states also are called 'experiences' but not in this paper. An experience is of the same type as another if