ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the history of the qualia concept. It provides an earlier sense of the term, starting with its nineteenth-century origin in English, continuing with Charles Sanders Peirce’s use of it, and finishing with the varied uses of the term between the time of Peirce and Lewis. Quale- consciousness refers to a dimension of qualitative difference other than a difference in intensity. After Peirce’s invocation of the concept, “quale,” “qualia” and “quales” appear regularly in the literature of philosophy and psychology from the 1870s through the early twentieth century. H. Nichols discusses qualia in the context of feelings of pleasure and pain. He does so in a revealing fashion, in that he explicitly distinguishes talk of senses from talk of qualia. In addition to the context of pleasure and pain, the other main context for discussing qualia comes up in terms of the experience of space.
