ABSTRACT
In philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind these days, qualia are all the rage. Like them or doubt their very existence, it seems impossible to develop a contemporary philosophy of psychology that does not reckon with them. For a term that has such a strong foothold in the contemporary literature, it is striking how little of its history is discussed. Given the current lack of agreement over how to think about qualia, it would behoove us to explore how this concept came into current discussions. This sentiment has recently been voiced by Tim Crane (2001), one of the few philosophers to have explored the history of qualia in order to understand contemporary debates:
To have a clear understanding of [the mind-body problem], we have to have a clear understanding of the notion of qualia. But despite the centrality of this notion [. . .], it seems to me that there is not a clear consensus about how the term ‘qualia’ should be understood, and to this extent the contemporary problem of consciousness is not well-posed. (170)
This is a disturbing possibility, especially if John Searle (1998) is correct in claiming that, “[t]he problem of consciousness is identical with the problem of qualia” (28). Searle’s sentiment here might be an overly strong one – or perhaps not; it depends on who is writing – but there can be no denying the centrality of this notion in contemporary philosophical discussions of the mind, as indicated by attempts to dene it in reference works (Blackburn 1994; Nagel 1995; Shoemaker 1999; Colman 2001) to even the shallowest survey of recent works (Jackson 1982; Dennett 1988; Shoemaker 1991; Tye 1994; Chalmers 1995; Kind 2001; Graham and Horgan, forthcoming).
