Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Mind Research Interest Group (Adam Pautz, Brown)

The Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Mind Research Interest Group is delighted to welcome as guest speaker Adam Pautz, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Brown University. His research is about consciousness and its place in nature, the idea that all facts are grounded in physical facts, and the issue of whether things are the way they appear. He tries to make progress on some of the traditional “big questions” about mind and world by using recent science as well a priori methods.

Pautz’s current research project is a “consciousness-first” program in the philosophy of mind. The idea is that conscious acquaintance is not something that can be reductively explained in other terms (e. g. representation plus cognitive or rational access); rather it must be taken as a starting point from which to explain other things (cognition, rationality, value). The resulting view has some similarities to Bertrand Russell’s early view about the foundational role of acquaintance.

Talk Title

Acquaintance and the Distance Problem about Qualities

Talk Abstract

The qualities presented in experience determine what the experience is like. When you experience a quality — the apparent redness of a tomato, say, or the scent of a rose — a long causal chain runs from the external object to your brain. Reductive physicalists disagree about where in this chain the quality lies: whether it is a distal element (as phenomenal externalists think) or some proximal step in the neural process (as phenomenal internalists think). Wherever they locate it, they face a meta-semantic problem: how do the purely physical facts determine that our thought and talk about qualia latch onto that precise step rather than any other? I argue that the most promising solution to this kind of problem appeals to acquaintance — but that it sits uneasily with reductive physicalism.