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Review article published In:
The Emergence of Consciousness: A top-down, social phenomenon?
Edited by Jonathan Cole and Marcelo Dascal †
[Pragmatics & Cognition 18:3] 2010
► pp. 597–606
Review article

Tye on materialism without phenomenal concepts

Comments on Consciousness Revisited

| Tel Aviv University

In this review article I examine Michel Tye’s recent reassessment of the phenomenal concept strategy. The phenomenal concept strategy is employed in the attempts to respond to the classical arguments that challenge materialism. I examine Tye’s reasons for abandoning the phenomenal concept strategy (a strategy that he himself advocated in his earlier writings), and I examine the elements of his new position according to which the materialist response should involve ‘singular when filled’ content schema, as well as a version of the Russellian distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. In the final part I criticize the adequacy of Tye’s theory not as a response to the dualists but rather as a response to opponents of representationalism from the materialist camp.

Keywords: consciousness, content schema, dualism, knowledge by acquaintance, materialism, perception, phenomenal concepts, the explanatory gap, the knowledge argument, the zombie argument, the modal argument
Published online: 12 April 2011
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.18.3.08sen
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