Grasping at Ga_ps

John Heil (Washington University in St. Louis, Durham University)

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Abstract:

Few philosophers nowadays doubt the existence and significance of a persistent ‘explanatory gap’ in our understanding of the nature of conscious experiences and their relation to the material world. Concerns about the explanatory gap have their roots in Saul Kripke’s 1972 argument against the mind–brain identity theory: if a is identical with b, then there is no world at which a fails to be identical with b; as Descartes showed, however, it is conceivable for minds to exist in the absence of material bodies; so, Kripke concluded, minds cannot be identified with material bodies. In 1983 Joseph Levine argued that, although Kripke’s original argument falls short of establishing that minds are distinct from material bodies, the argument has an epistemological counterpart. The disparate character of conscious qualities and qualities of material bodies creates an ineliminable barrier to our understanding how the mental could be identified with the physical. This, and other, expressly epistemological arguments have subsequently been deployed in the service of the metaphysical thesis originally defended by Kripke: the mental cannot be identified with the material. This paper critically examines the practice of drawing metaphysical conclusions from epistemological premises.