Source
Dennett (1988), “Quining Qualia”, in Marcel & Bisiach (eds), Consciousness in Contemporary Science, OUP, pp. 42–77, LIT-433, read in full in NOTE-357 from the author’s web text. NOTE-357 cites sections and the paper’s own numbering of its intuition pumps, never pages.
NOTE-357 said “No new THEORY”: a THEORY that “the absent-qualia intuition
has no subject-accessible content” would need the replies, which the
record does not hold. That reason bars an Active account, not a stated
one. This THEORY is filed Proposed, on the reading’s own claims, and
the missing replies are named in what would settle it.
What was actually shown
The target (§2). Qualia as the tradition has them are (1) ineffable, (2) intrinsic, (3) private and (4) directly or immediately apprehensible. The claim is that experience has no properties special in all these ways. It does not deny that experience is real or has properties.
No privileged access (pumps #5–#6). An “evil neurosurgeon” can invert an early visual channel, so that qualia are inverted, or the memory links used to compare today’s hues with yesterday’s, so that only reactions are. On waking the subject should say: “either my qualia have been inverted or my memory-linked qualia-reactions have been inverted. I wonder which!”
Chase and Sanborn (pump #7). Two coffee tasters no longer like the coffee. Chase says his standards changed and the taste did not; Sanborn says his tasters changed. Third-person tests, blind retasting or physiology, can favour one pole in extreme cases. They cannot separate the components when the effects are small, and the taster’s own judgment is no better evidence than a naive observer’s. What he can report with authority is that the relation between sipping and judging changed.
The dilemma (§4). Either reactions are partly constitutive of how a thing tastes, as the experienced beer drinker insists (pump #9), and qualia are relational, not intrinsic; or they are not, and the subject cannot get at them. The ordinary concept does not choose.
The replacement (§6). Practical ineffability is the information richness of a property detector’s deliverance, like the osprey cry heard once (pump #13) or the torn edge of a Jello box, which cannot be described without becoming a recipe for forging its mate (pump #14). Privacy is idiosyncrasy of discrimination profiles, which is testable. Felt homogeneity is functional invariability, which training can break (pump #15, the guitar harmonic).
What could have come out otherwise. The two surgeries could have differed from the inside, or physiology could have placed a small compensation before or after “the qualia phase” (pump #8). The paper stipulates that they do not, and gives four clinical achromatopsia cases that the qualia vocabulary describes in competing ways.
What this does not say
- That there is no experience, or that experience lacks properties. The denial is of the four marks together. Frankish’s “access consciousness is the whole story” (LIT-103, note 2) is stronger than anything this paper asserts (NOTE-357, Connections).
- That the indistinguishability is shown. Pump #6 needs the two surgeries to have identical introspective effects. That is stipulated and not defended, and a defender of qualia can deny it (NOTE-357, C2).
- That every definition of qualia is answered. The paper argues against Shoemaker’s milder “qualitative or phenomenal features” only by asking what “phenomenal” means. Definitions by example, such as Schwitzgebel’s (LIT-191), are not addressed.
- A metaphysical thesis stronger than the wording. Endnote 2 calls the choice between eliminative and reductive materialism here “not so much … a doctrinal issue as a tactical issue”. Read with it, “there simply are no qualia at all” is a recommendation about vocabulary.
- That the absent-qualia intuition about groups or machines is false. The paper’s point is that such an intuition is not about anything the subject could detect; it offers no criterion that separates a modular mind from a nation (THEORY-043).
Connections
- Illusionism. Frankish (THEORY-633) takes the four marks from this paper as what weak illusionists deflate, and generalises the denial from qualia to all phenomenal properties. Taylor (THEORY-563) reads the qualia attack as peripheral to Dennett’s positive view.
- Organisational invariance (THEORY-507) turns on the same premise, that a change in experience the subject could not notice is a reductio, and concludes the opposite: qualia are fixed by organisation.
- Block. “Troubles with Functionalism” (LIT-407) is quoted for the jazz reply (“if you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know”), and the wine-tasting machine (pump #2) is an absent-qualia case in miniature. Block’s Inverted Earth (THEORY-095) answers the memory-malfunction diagnosis by building a case with no internal disturbance for it to attach to. THEORY-103 records that Block rejects by name the move from the subject’s inability to tell two hypotheses apart to the emptiness of the notion.
- The hard problem (THEORY-694): “Facing Up” lists Dennett under the strategy “deny the phenomenon”; for qualia, this is the paper it points to.