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- Joseph Levine is a philosophy professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a philosopher of mind famous for his (1983) insight into the difficulty that a physicalist theory has in explaining how material properties of a brain can account for the way things consciously feel when they are experienced. He called it the "explanatory gap."
Joseph Levine (born January 17, 1952) is an American philosopher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who received his PhD from Harvard University in 1981. He works on philosophy of mind and is best known for formulating the explanatory gap argument against a materialist explanation for consciousness. [1]
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- Stating The Problem
- Underlying Reasons For The Problem
- Responses to The Problem
- References and Further Reading
a. Chalmers
David Chalmers coined the name “hard problem” (1995, 1996), but the problem is not wholly new, being a key element of the venerable mind-body problem. Still, Chalmers is among those most responsible for the outpouring of work on this issue. The problem arises because “phenomenal consciousness,” consciousness characterized in terms of “what it’s like for the subject,” fails to succumb to the standard sort of functional explanation successful elsewhere in psychology (compare Block 1995). Psycho...
b. Nagel
Thomas Nagel sees the problem as turning on the “subjectivity” of conscious mental states (1974, 1986). He argues that the facts about conscious states are inherently subjective—they can only be fully grasped from limited types of viewpoints. However, scientific explanation demands an objective characterization of the facts, one that moves away from any particular point of view. Thus, the facts about consciousness elude science and so make “the mind-body problem really intractable” (Nagel 197...
c. Levine
Joseph Levine argues that there is a special “explanatory gap” between consciousness and the physical (1983, 1993, 2001). The challenge of closing this explanatory gap is the hard problem. Levine argues that a good scientific explanation ought to deductively entail what it explains, allowing us to infer the presence of the target phenomenon from a statement of laws or mechanisms and initial conditions (Levine 2001, 74-76). Deductive entailment is a logical relation where if the premises of an...
But what it is about consciousness that generates the hard problem? It may just seem obvious that consciousness could not be physical or functional. But it is worthwhile to try and draw a rough circle around the problematic features of conscious experience, if we can. This both clarifies what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness an...
a. Eliminativism
Eliminativism holds that there is no hard problem of consciousness because there is no consciousness to worry about in the first place. Eliminativism is most clearly defended by Rey 1997, but see also Dennett 1978, 1988, Wilkes 1984, and Ryle 1949. On the face of it, this response sounds absurd: how can one deny that conscious experience exists? Consciousness might be the one thing that is certain in our epistemology. But eliminativist views resist the idea that what we call experience is equ...
b. Strong Reductionism
Strong reductionism holds that consciousness exists, but contends that it is reducible to tractable functional, nonintrinsic properties. Strong reductionism further claims that the reductive story we tell about consciousness fully explains, without remainder, all that needs to be explained about consciousness. Reductionism, generally, is the idea that complex phenomena can be explained in terms of the arrangement and functioning of simpler, better understood parts. Key to strong reductionism,...
c. Weak Reductionism
Weak reductionism, in contrast to the strong version, holds that consciousness is a simple or basic phenomenon, one that cannot be informatively broken down into simpler nonconscious elements. But according to the view we can still identify consciousness with physical properties if the most parsimonious and productive theory supports such an identity (Block 2002, Block & Stalnaker 1999, Hill 1997, Loar 1997, 1999, Papineau 1993, 2002, Perry 2001). What’s more, once the identity has been estab...
Albert, D. Z. Quantum Mechanics and Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.Armstrong, D. A Materialist Theory of Mind. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968.Armstrong, D. “What is Consciousness?” In The Nature of Mind. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.Baars, B. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Joseph Levine draws together a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive approach to philosophy of mind. He defends a materialist view of the mind against various challenges, and offers illuminating studies of consciousness, phenomenal concepts, mental representation, demonstrative thought, and cognitive phenomenology.
A Posteriori Physicalism and the Explanatory Gap, forthcoming in Uriah Kriegel, ed., Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
Joseph Levine argues that there is an “explanatory gap” between the brain and the conscious mind. Papineau agrees that there is such a gap, but points out that similar gaps are found with all identity claims involving directly referring terms, and so the gap does nothing to discredit materialism.
The term ‘explanatory gap’ was first introduced in Levine (1983), in the context of a discussion of Kripke's argument (1980) against the mind–body identity thesis. Since then the discussion surrounding it has developed beyond the context of Kripke's argument.
Joseph Levine's Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness 583 consciousness-including higher-order thought theory, externalist represen-tationalism, and internalist representationalism. To my mind, his critique of such reductionist positions is powerful and persuasive. The basic problem is
