Original scientific paper
Is the Antipathetic Fallacy Responsible for the Intuition that Consciousness is Distinct from the Physical?
François Kammerer
orcid.org/0000-0001-5792-0439
; Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Institut Jean Nicod (ENS/EHESS/CNRS), Paris, France
Abstract
Numerous philosophers have recently tried to defend physicalism regarding
phenomenal consciousness against dualist intuitions, by explaining
the existence of dualist intuitions within a purely physicalist framework.
David Papineau, for example, suggested that certain peculiar features
of some of our concepts of phenomenal experiences (the so-called “phenomenal
concepts”) led us to commit what he called the “Antipathetic
Fallacy”: they gave us the erroneous impression that phenomenal experiences
must be distinct from purely physical states (the “intuition of
distinctness”), even though they are not. Papineau’s hypothesis has been
accepted, though under other names and in different forms, by many
physicalist philosophers. Pär Sundström has tried to argue against Papineau’s
account of the intuition of distinctness by showing that it was
subjected to counterexamples. However, Papineau managed to show that
Sundström’s counterexamples were not compelling, and that they could
be answered within his framework. In this paper, I want to draw inspiration
from Sundström, and to put forth some refi ned counterexamples
to Papineau’s account, which cannot be answered in the same way as
Sundström’s. My conclusion is that we cannot explain the intuition of
distinctness as the result of a kind of “Antipathetic Fallacy”.
Keywords
Consciousness; dualism; physicalism; introspection; concepts; intuition.
Hrčak ID:
253504
URI
Publication date:
10.5.2018.
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