Phenomenal Concepts And Physicalism: Break The Shell Of Dualism

The mind-body problem, especially the place of phenomenal consciousness in nature as its contemporary exhibition, has been baffling philosophers all the way. The two main traditional answers to this question are dualism and physicalism. In recent fashion, the debate between them come to focus on the essential point that, whether the "explanatory gap" between the physical and the mental of conscious experience has anything to do with the metaphysical picture of our world. Both physicalists and dualists have rationales to support their own position thus denying the other's. This situation, in some philosopher's eyes, constitutes an unsolvable "metaphysical gridlock" ever and forever.In this paper, I focus on today's most promising defense for physicalism, that is "the phenomenal concept strategy". A phenomenal concept is the concept of a particular type of sensory or perceptual experience, where the notion of experience is understood phenomenologically. According to this idea, phenomenal concepts are importantly different from other concepts—especially physical ones, and arguments from dualists against physicalism fatally neglect to take this difference into account. That counts the reason why the explanatory gap merely works on our cognitive or conceptual level, rather than it is our epistemic reflection on metaphysical reality. However, after presenting the relevant background of the strategy, I argue that even though the phenomenal concept strategy is on the right track, there are at least four deficiencies faced by those popular versions of phenomenal concept theories more or less. They are, firstly, the failing of naturalize what a phenomenal concept is;secondly, the alignment of the strategy with the identity theory of mind can't take the challenge from the multiple realiability of consciousness;thirdly, in the face of Ball and Tye's anti-realist argument, none of the popular versions could meet the vindication that phenomenal concepts really exist; and the last one is, none of them is robust enough to rebut the "master argument" against the phenomenal concept strategy from Chalmers. Along with the diagnosis, I draw up the morals about how to avoid or dissolve these crises, which in turn makes a list of sufficient conditions for constructing an ideal version of phenomenal concept theory for physicalism. By which, I see it is so robust that it can deal with both the deficiencies among the popular versions and the further attacks from dualism. I go on argue and defend that, this ideal version is satisfied by Aydede and Guzeldere's information-theoretic account of phenomenal concept, which is base on the informational understanding of our cognitive architecture provided by Drestke. The spirit of information-theoretic account of phenomenal concepts is that, according to the different hierarchies of our sensory and cognitive centers, in which the information flow is consumed, thus it characterizes a special informational character and semantic structure that closely tie those sensory concepts to the brain states realizing conscious experiences. When we introspect our own conscious experience, it requires a new class of concepts, they are phenomenal concepts which refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight:it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts. Given this account, thus I will show how the dualist is doomed to be dumb.In the final chapter, yet I argue that as the fact that we are all natural born dualists or dualists on the level of cognition, along with the reason that physicalism can only be taken as metaphysics rather than a worldview; therefore dualism can be legally survived as the "attitudes dualism". I hope it can be seen as a proper treat to dualism after the shell was broken.