ABSTRACT
In the wake of Thomas Nagel’s seminal “What is it like to be a Bat?” there has been an almost universal consensus among philosophers and cognitive scientists that consciousness is a deeply mysterious phenomenon. According to this orthodoxy, consciousness threatens to defy scientific explanation in particular and human understanding in general – a position known as “(new) mysterianism”. More seriously still, decisive aspects of so-called “phenomenal consciousness” are said to defy not just knowledge but even intelligible linguistic expression, a stance amounting to “(neo-) mysticism”.
While some of the dissenting voices have come from hardcore reductionist materialists, others have espoused a deflationism inspired by Wittgenstein and Ryle (Beckermann, Dennett, Hacker, Hanfling, Tugendhat). I shall defend a deflationist perspective on phenomenal consciousness against both mysterianism and mysticism. Many of the allegedly irresolvable and profound puzzles – in particular the ineffability of so-called “qualia” or feelings of “what it is like” – mark linguistic muddles rather than limits of language. At the same time I shall point out important lacunae in extant attempts to clarify these issues.
For purposes of illustration and as an intriguing field of application, I shall follow Nagel and concentrate on the question of what kind of phenomenal consciousness, if any, non-human animals can possess. Nagel’s original challenge concerning animal consciousness still stands. Even if one avoids the grammatical Frankenstein of “what it is likes”, ascribing conscious states of an intentional kind to animals is threatened by a systemic indeterminacy diagnosed by Davidson and Stich. The threat can partly be averted by distinguishing its two sources – holism and indeterminacy – and by considering parallel threats in the human/linguistic case – Quine’s “indeterminacy of translation” and Wittgenstein’s reflections on the “indeterminacy of the mental” in his last writings. Nevertheless, in some respects, animal consciousness may constitute a genuine limitation of language.
