For a quarter of a century, the default physicalist response to arguments for property dualism has been the phenomenal concept strategy (PCS). The strategy turns on a claim about the nature of our phenomenal concepts — the concepts we employ when we attend to our current experiences and think about what they are like. There are many variants of the strategy, and the literature on it is large and technical, but the core idea is simple.
It’s this. Phenomenal concepts function as bare referential devices — demonstratives perhaps. They do not pick out their referents as properties that fit some physical description but latch onto them directly via the exercise of some mental capacity. Since we do not conceptualize phenomenal properties as physical ones, we can easily imagine them varying independently of the physical facts, and this accounts for the intuitions that drive the anti-physicalist arguments — intuitions about zombies, inverts, Mary, and so on. Yet, phenomenal properties might be physical ones all the same. The only dualism the anti-physicalist arguments establish is one of concepts, physical and phenomenal.
I don’t think the strategy works. For it does nothing to explain why we find phenomenal properties anomalous. After all, we employ direct referential devices all the time without generating any ontological worries. Imagine being in a chemistry lab and asking, “What’s this?” or “What sort of stuff is that?”, pointing to a substance or holding up a sample. We don’t conceive of the substance we’re referring to in any particular way — as, let’s say, an acid salt. And, I suppose, we could imagine the substance being removed while all the acid salts remain where they are. But if we are told on good authority that the substance is an acid salt, then we are satisfied. We wouldn’t typically experience any puzzlement as how it could be an acid salt, and we wouldn’t think it conceivable that the stuff we’re indicating could disappear while all the acid salts remained in place. If we were to feel any puzzlement on these matters, it would because of how the stuff looked and our background beliefs about what acid salts are like.
If the PCS were sound, then the same should be true of phenomenal properties. Gesturing inwards at a twinge of pain and asking “What’s this?”, should not generate any intuitions about the nature of the state picked out and we should have no difficulty in accepting that it is a physical one, if that’s what the science indicated.
But that doesn’t happen. Even if we’re thoroughly convinced that the brain has no nonphysical properties, we still feel puzzled by the situation. We still can’t understand how this twinge of pain could be a brain state, and we still have a strong inclination to think that there’s some extra feature present that is only contingently connected to the physical.
The moral I draw from that is that phenomenal concepts are not bare referential devices. They incorporate some substantive conception of their referents. If they are demonstratives, they have a tacit theoretical sortal attached. We wonder, not simply, “What’s this?”, but “What’s this phenomenal feel?”.
What is this substantive conception of the phenomenal? I think it’s roughly the one Daniel Dennett dismantled in “Quining qualia” — the concept of a qualitative state that is private, ineffable, intrinsic, and immediately apprehended. Maybe those commitments are qualified in various ways, but they are still strong enough to make the conception incompatible with our conception of the physical. Hence our puzzlement.
If that’s right, then there’s only one option for the physicalist, and that is to say that phenomenal concepts misrepresent their referents. The properties they pick out (assuming they pick out determinate properties at all, which they may not) aren’t really phenomenal ones. And that’s illusionism.
For twenty-odd years, the PCS has acted as a band-aid holding physicalism and phenomenal realism together, and it’s worn out.
I’m interested in how you see the relationship between your illusionism and Carruthers’ “qualia irrealism”. Carruthers current view, according to Human and Animal Minds, is that the properties picked out by phenomenal concepts are globally broadcast nonconceptual contents. Yet he is also a vociferous defender of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. So it seems one can be a qualia irrealist, and agree that phenomenal concepts refer to physical properties, while also defending the Phenomenal Concept Strategy.
So what’s the difference between you and Carruthers? Possibly this: you think our intuitions about qualia, the explanatory gap, Mary, zombies etc. result from substantive (mis)conceptions that are intrinsic to our phenomenal concepts. The misconceptions are baked in. Carruthers thinks of the phenomenal concepts themselves as bare referential devices which are ‘philosophically innocent’, as it were: they don’t inherently contain substantive misconceptions. He thinks that our intuitions about qualia, Mary, zombies etc. result from an extrinsic feature of phenomenal concepts: the lack of any inferential connections between our phenomenal concepts and our physical/structural concepts.