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Philos Stud (2010) 151:299327
DOI 10.1007/s11098-009-9439-x
Justin Sytsma Edouard Machery
Published online: 1 October 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
Abstract Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We rst offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering the implications of our ndings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness.
Keywords Phenomenal consciousness Folk concept of subjective experience
Experimental philosophy Hard problem of consciousness
Our rst goal in this article is to examine whether ordinary people (viz. people without training in philosophy or in consciousness studies) and philosophers conceive of subjective experience in a similar way. Philosophers see subjective experiences as including such diverse mental states as seeing red and feeling pain, treating them as having something in common, namely that they are phenomenal viz. that they share the second-order property that there is something it is like (Nagel 1974) to be in these mental states. We provide suggestive evidence that the folk, by contrast, do not conceive of subjective experience in this way. Our second goal is to explore this folk conception for its own sake. We successively consider two accounts. We rst examine whether the folk treat perceptual states differently
J. Sytsma (&) E. Machery
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USAe-mail: [email protected]
Two conceptions of subjective experience
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from bodily sensations or felt emotions, taking the latter, but not the former, to be subjectively experienced. This might be phrased in terms of the folk distinguishing between those states that tell us about the world outside our skin (the products of the external senses) and those states that tell us about ourselves from the skin in (the products of the internal senses). Rejecting this rst account, we argue for an alternative hypothesis: For the folk,...