Defending Phenomenalism

Abstract

According to phenomenalism, physical things are a certain kind of possibility for experience. This paper clarifies the phenomenalist position and addresses some main objections to it, with the aim of showing that phenomenalism is a live option that merits a place alongside dualism and materialism in contemporary metaphysical debate.

Metaphysical idealism revisited

“…Pelczar's ambitious project of idealism (2015, 2019) can be seen as consisting of two parts: phenomenological atemporalism (à la Henri Poincaré) and radical phenomenalism (à la J. S. Mill) 24 . The former is the view that conscious experience does not exist in physical time.…”

“…Idealism, of which Pelczar's radical phenomenalism is a version, 26 comes in to answer this question. His radical phenomenalism has three components (2019): 1. the irreducibility of consciousness; 2. a reverse direction of supervenience (viz. the physical supervening on the mental, Pelczar calls this “empirical supervenience”); and 3. a Millian thesis that the mental features are not metaphysically grounded in anything.…”

“…A remarkable feature of Pelczar's account is the way it preserves the “sober intuition” that “it is possible for a world physically identical to ours to contain no conscious experience.” (2019, p. 576) For Pelczar, physical things are constituted by potentials for experience (Pelczar also uses the Millian term “permanent possibilities of sensation”), 27 which may well go unrealized but are nonetheless mental. So, a world that is physically identical to ours but lacks actual experiences is not a world that differs from ours by lacking mental features altogether, it differs from ours only by having none of the potentials for experience realized.…”

“…So, a world that is physically identical to ours but lacks actual experiences is not a world that differs from ours by lacking mental features altogether, it differs from ours only by having none of the potentials for experience realized. The most interesting, and perhaps also controversial, implication of the doctrine of empirical supervenience is that a world that is mentally identical to ours “contains all the physical phenomena that our world contains.” (2019, p. 579) Refutation of this claim requires a counterexample in which a possible world has all and only the mental features of our world but lacks some of its physical features. Pelczar anticipates three such scenarios and argues that none of them count as counterexample, because they turn out to either involve different phenomenal potentials or contain the same physical objects.…”

Idealism and illusions

“…1 1 See, for example, Adams (2007), Chalmers (2019), Foster (2008), Pelczar (2015, 2019), Segal and Goldschmidt (2017), Smithson (2017), and Yetter‐Chappell (2017). …”