Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 

About: Pacific Philosophical Quarterly is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Argument & Moral responsibility. It has an ISSN identifier of 0279-0750. Over the lifetime, 1131 publications have been published receiving 16504 citations.

Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap

Abstract: J n “Naming and Necessity”1 and “Identity and Necessity,”2 Kripke presents a version of the Cartesian argument against mate­ rialism. His argument involves two central claims: first, that all identity state­ ments using rigid designators on both sides of the identity sign are, if true at all, true in all possible worlds where the terms refer; second, that psycho-physical identity statements are conceivably false, and therefore, by the first claim, actually false. My purpose in this paper is to transform Kripke’s argument from a metaphysical one into an epistemological one. My general point is this. Kripke relies upon a particular intuition regarding conscious experience to support his second claim. I find this intuition important, not least because of its stubborn resistance to philosophical dissolution. But I don’t believe this intuition supports the meta­ physical thesis Kripke defends—namely, that pyscho-physical identity statements must be false. Rather, I think it supports a closely related epistemological thesis— namely, that psycho-physical identity statements leave a significant explanatory gap, and, as a corollary, that we don’t have any way of determining exactly which psycho-physical identity statements are true.3 One cannot conclude from my version of the argument that materialism is false, which makes my version a weaker attack than Kripke’s. Nevertheless, it does, if correct, constitute a problem for materialism, and one that I think better captures the uneasiness many philos­ ophers feel regarding that doctrine. I will present this epistemological argument by starting with Kripke’s own argument and extracting the underlying intuition. For brevity’s sake, I am going to assume knowledge of Kripke’s general position concerning necessity and the theory of reference, and concentrate only on the argument against materialism. To begin with, let us assume that we are dealing with a physicalist type-identity theory. That is, our materialist is committed to statements like: (1) Pain is the firing of C-fibers. On Kripke’s general theory, if (1) is true at all it is necessarily true. The same of course, is the case with the following statement: (2) Heat is the motion of molecules. That is, if (2) is true at all it is necessarily true. So far so good.

Causal and Metaphysical Necessity

Abstract: Any property has two sorts of causal features: “forward-looking” ones, having to do with what its instantiation can contribute to causing, and ldquo;backward-looking” ones, having to do with how its instantiation can be caused Such features of a property are essential to it, and properties sharing all of their causal features are identical Causal necessity is thus a special case of metaphysical necessity Appeals to imaginability have no more force against this view than they do against the Kripkean view that statements like “Gold is an element” are metaphysically necessary

What are Physical Properties

Abstract: This paper concerns an issue in the metaphysics of properties. The issue is: what are physical properties? What distinguishes physical properties from all other properties? My conclusions will be ‘downbeat’. I will argue that some major recent approaches to this issue prove unsatisfactory, and that the issue is much more intractable than has widely been supposed. The moral I draw is that there is no principled and well-defined distinction between physical properties and all other properties, and accordingly certain programmes in metaphysics should be abandoned because they mistakenly assume that there is such a distinction.