Comment on Dretske

Abstract

The conclusion of Fred Dretske's paper is strikingly counterintuitive, as he himself is the first to admit. For there is a strong inclination to hold that our sensations and feelings are internal -implying, if we are materialists, that an exact physical duplicate of a given person must be undergoing the same sensations and feelings as that person. But the point of Dretske's paper it to challenge this idea. He argues that there is, on reflection, no reason to agree with it: no reason to think that the way pains feel to S, or the way red things look to S, are facts solely about S; no reason to think that what it's like to be a molecular duplicate of S must be the same as what it's like to be S; no reason, in other words, to assume that there is such a thing as purely internal experience. The way Dretske arrives at this conclusion is surprising and ingenious. For the usual basis of the inclination to hold that phenomenal states are internal is the special epistemological access each of us has to what we are experiencing: if I have a pain then I know I do, and vice versa; and how could this be so unless the pain is wholly inside me. But Dretske argues, on the contrary, that if phenomenal states really were internal, then this fact about them would militate against first-person awareness. Thus, according to Dretske, the idea that phenomenal states are internal, far from explaining our special