Phenomenal Concepts and the Problem of Acquaintance

Some contemporary discussion about the explanation of consciousness substantially recapitulates a decisive debate about reference, knowledge, and justification from an earlier stage of the analytic tradition. In particular, I argue that proponents of a recently popular strategy for accounting for an explanatory gap between physical and phenomenal facts — the so-called ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ — face a problem that was originally fiercely debated by Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. The question that is common to both the older and the contemporary discussion is that of how the presence or presentation of phenomenal experiences can play a role in justifying beliefs or judgments about them. This problem is, moreover, the same as what was classically discussed as the problem of acquaintance. Interestingly, both physicalist and non-physicalist proponents of the phenomenal concept strategy today face this problem. I consider briefly some recent attempts to solve it and conclude that, although it is prima facie very plausible that acquaintance exists, we have, as yet, no good account of it. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate that proponents of a recently popular physicalist strategy for explaining consciousness — what has been called the phenomenal concept strategy — share with certain anti-physicalist phenomenal realists a common problem, which was also a problem for Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath in the days of the Vienna Circle. Though it has implications for ontology and metaphysics, this problem is essentially one about justification: how can judgments, claims, or beliefs about phenomenal experience be justified, at Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20, No. 5–6, 2013, pp. ??–?? Correspondence: Email: [email protected] least in part, by the presence or presentation of the relevant experiences themselves? In this paper, I argue on conceptual grounds that all proponents of the phenomenal concept strategy face this problem, and on historical grounds that it is indeed a general one, one that may cut deeper than the contemporary debate between physicalism and phenomenalism itself.