Oh Yes It Is

Abstract

Brie Gertler (this issue) claims that I 'relocate the mystery of the explanatory gap, from the specialness of phenomenal qualities to the specialness of phenomenal concepts' and further that my account 'does not diminish the mystery' (p. 693). The main objection I have to her criticism is that the view she attacks is not mine. What I say about phenomenal concepts in Tye 1999 has little in common with what Gertler says that I say. Gertler is guilty of the fallacy of the straw man. The main purpose of this note is to restate my position on phenomenal concepts (without rehearsing all the details again), and to show that Gertler has failed to come to grips with it. I take phenomenal concepts to refer directly. For concepts of this sort, the referent is presented without the assistance of associated features distinct from the referent which the thinker a priori associates with it. There is no separate guise that the referent takes in the thinker's thought. Intuitively, this seems to me the right approach. If I focus introspectively on the feeling of pain, as I experience it, I form a conception of how it feels, and the concept that enables me to do that is not one that I apply to the feeling by discerning non-phenomenal features that aid in the identification of its phenomenal character. Intuitively, I know that I am in pain just by attending to how my state feels, not by knowing something else connected to it. In Tye 1998, I did not propose a specific account of how such direct reference is accomplished, but it should be clear from my remarks elsewhere that I am sympathetic to a causal chain or tracking story. Now my claim that phenomenal concepts refer directly is not, of course, to be conflated with the claim that any concept that refers directly is phenomenal. That I deny. For a concept that refers directly to be a phenomenal concept, further conditions are needed. We thus need to distinguish the question, 'What is it that makes a phenomenal concept of quality Q be about or of Q?' from the question, 'What makes a phenomenal concept phenomenal?'. Concerning the latter question, the thesis in Tye 1998 was that a given directly referring concept is phenomenal if and only if it functions in the right sort of way. I denied, however, that this functioning could be specified a priori in a way that eschews any phenomenal language. My view was (and is) that the concept of a phenomenal concept is concep-