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In this book I analyse the character and defend the integrity of psychophysiological explanations of sensory qualities. Many philosophers doubt that one can provide any genuine explanations of how things look, feel, or seem to a perceiving subject. To invoke one popular formulation, facts of that sort seem to be essentially subjective, so that they can be understood only in their own terms. Any attempt to analyse or explain qualitative facts in non-qualitative terms seems doomed. According to this conception, no existing discipline—and no currently imaginable discipline—could explain the qualitative character of conscious experience.
We could perhaps resign ourselves to a pensive scepticism about qualia, but only if we could somehow ignore the discomfiting agitation produced by the experimental disciplines. Psychology and psychophysiology provide what at least seem to be genuine explanations of some qualitative facts—of how things look, feel, or seem to someone. Although some of the empirical premisses in such explanations are undoubtedly incorrect, and large gaps remain, the explanations contain no obvious logical flaws, and in principle seem capable of explaining what they are intended to explain. In particular, colour science seems to be the success story of scientific psychology thus far—and the scope of its explanations seems to expand monthly, without resistance. Are all its explanations bogus? They seem sometimes to account for the fact that a particular stimulus looks red to a particular subject in a particular situation. Are there some hidden errors in such explanations that vitiate them? Is the explanandum something other than a qualitative fact? These and other questions immediately arise when one confronts qualia scepticism with some real examples from current psychophysiology.
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