The Explanatory Gap: The Responses of Horgan and Papineau

The Explanatory Gap: The Responses of Horgan and Papineau

The what it is like to undergo an experience is essential to understanding that experience. Known by philosophers as subjective qualia, these characteristics are part of what makes a felt experience exactly that experience. If we introspect our own mental states, this seems apparent and incontrovertible. Most philosophers are unwilling to grant that subjective qualia are non-physical states, and attempts to face this problem and maintain physicalism must address arguments from qualia. While differing physical explanations for these subjective qualia exist, I will only briefly refer to them here as qualia will serve only as a means of leading the reader to the Explanatory Gap(1). The Explanatory Gap is a uniquely puzzling problem for physicalist philosophies of mind.

The felt qualities of any experience, in addition to being essential to and inseparable from that very experience, are also perspectivally subjective. This means that the experiencer must be experiencing those felt qualities now or have felt them at some previous time and be recalling them to have a full concept of the phenomena. Perhaps this philosophical language will be more understandable with examples of what is really another readily apparent notion- Could a person know the awfulness of pain if she was born without the capacity to feel any pains? Could a person experience the specific joy of strawberries and Champagne without ever having had this exact experience? It would be difficult to deny that subjective qualia are perspectivally unique. One would face seemingly absurd possibilities such as feeling someone else's pains, and not having any subjective character to your own phenomenal experienc...

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... from Kripke by Joseph Levine, "Materialism And Qualia: The Explanatory Gap," Pacific Philosophic Quarterly, Vol. 64, eds. Hartry Field, Barbara Herman, Brian Loar, Miles Morgan, 1983; p.359.

8 This paragraph and the next are a paraphrase of Terence Horgan, "Jackson On Physical Information And Qualia" Philosophical Quarterly, 34: (1984) 147-52.

9 David Papineau's position is taken from chapter 4 of his book Philosophical Naturalism, entitled "Consciousness and the Antipathetic Fallacy." I acquired this from the world wide web @ http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/philosophy/ch4.html, but it was published in print in 1993.

10 Ibid., this connection is made in a footnote by Papineau to Horgan on the eighth page of chapter 4 (I am afraid I don't know the printed version's page number).

11 Ibid., page 11 of chapter 4.

12 Ibid., page 18 of chapter 4.