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Quining Qualia Quine's Way

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Don Ross
Don Ross
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
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Extract

Thanks largely to Daniel Dennett, I am a recent convert to what many will regard as the shocking hypothesis that qualia do not exist. This admission is not quite a confident sighting of that rarest of philosophical birds, an unequivocally sound and valid argument. For one thing, I have, like many, been frustrated by and suspicious of philosophers' use of qualia for some time, and have often wished them dead (the qualia, not the philosophers); so I was an easy mark. More to the point, I was persuaded by Dennett without being persuaded by his arguments. This is not intended as a confession of a Kirkegaardian penchant for preferring to believe the conclusions of bad arguments. Dennett enabled me finally to kick qualia out of my private (now public) ontology by providing, in the later sections of his “Quining Qualia” (Dennett 1988), an alternative conceptual vocabulary for talking about the contents of perceptual and reflective experience that genuinely makes no appeal, surreptitious or otherwise, to qualia. Furthermore, Dennett's most general motivations for banishing qualia—the convictions that there is no compelling evidence for them, that they serve no reliable explanatory purpose and that the hypothesis of their non-existence dissolves some otherwise wrenching philosophical dilemmas—are the right ones, and his paper made this clear to me. However, I feel the need to quine qualia again for myself, because I want them to stay dead, and am afraid that, due to some infelicities in his argument, Dennett has only wounded them.

Type
Qualia and Materialism/Les Qualia et le matérialisme
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 32 , Issue 3: Philosophy of Mind , Summer 1993 , pp. 439 - 459
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1993

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