Hawthrone ADVICE PDF

JOHN HAWTHORNE
ADVICE FOR PHYSICALISTS
(Received 29 October 2001)
ABSTRACT. This paper engages with two compelling challenges to physicalism,

each designed to show that the nature of experience is elusive from the standpoint
of physical science. It is argued that the physicalist is ultimately well placed to
meet both challenges.
We can all agree that such predicates as ‘is in pain’, ‘feel like
I did yesterday’ and ‘am having enjoyable experiences’ are often
true of us. The physicalist about experience takes on an additional
commitment: that the properties expressed by experience-describing
predicates are identical to properties whose natures are revealed by
some idealized physical science.1 There are two compelling chal-
lenges to physicalism. Each purports to show that the nature of
experience is elusive if one restricts oneself to the tools that physical
science provides. One of these challenges is very familiar, the other
not so. The first and best known challenge proceeds from the thesis
that it is possible that there be physical duplicates of ourselves which
lack sensations to the conclusion that facts about sensation are some-
thing over and above the physical facts.2 Following custom, let us
call this the Zombie Argument. The second, less familiar challenge,
proceeds from the thesis that physical science reveals the role of a
property but not its quiddity to the conclusion that even if experi-
ential properties were identical to physical properties, their natures
would be something over and above what physical science reveals.
Let us call this the Quiddity Argument (more on the notion of a
quiddity later).3
My goal in this paper is to offer advice to physicalists about
how to respond to each challenge. David Chalmers’ The Conscious
Mind will serve as my main foil: for while neither of the challenges
originates with Chalmers, his work nevertheless provides the most
sophisticated current articulation of them. Part One of this paper
explores two kinds of strategies for responding to the Zombie Argu-
Philosophical Studies 108: 17–52, 2002.

© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
18 JOHN HAWTHORNE
ment. Both strategies share a common thread: they try to assimilate

experiential concepts to concepts that are (on the one hand) clearly
unproblematic from the point of view of physicalism, but which are
(on the other) such that their extension is not a priori recoverable
from a full microphysical profile of the world. The upshot will be to
cast doubt on the key possibility claim that drives the Zombie Argu-
ment. Confident that the physicalist can meet the first challenge, I
shall ask in Part Two whether the Quiddity Argument constitutes a
serious additional challenge.
1. PART ONE: THE ZOMBIE ARGUMENT
1.1. Overview
In broad outline, the standard kind of anti-physicalist argument
begins by observing that we can conceive of zombies, creatures that
are physical duplicates of ourselves, but which lack experiences, and
concludes that facts about experience are something over and above
the physical facts.
In some versions, this argument can appear more like a show
of entrenchment than a philosophically compelling challenge. We
all know that in some recognizable sense of ‘conceive’,4 we have
been able to conceive of all sorts of things that are not possible: that
Hespersus is not Phosphorus, that water is not H2 O, that Goldbach’s
Conjecture is false (assuming it is necessarily true. If Goldbach’s
Conjecture is necessarily false, plug in ‘that Goldbach’s Conjecture
is true’). Now if the anti-physicalist just insists without argument
that it is in a thicker sense of ‘conceive’ – one according to which
conceivability does entail possibility – that zombies are conceivable,
then his “argument” will strike one as no more than dogmatic
posturing, certainly nothing that is likely to be dialectically threat-
ening to the physicalist.
The cutting edge of anti-physicalism, for which Chalmers is a
more than adequate representative, has a lot more going for it.
Drawing on work by Saul Kripke, Frank Jackson, and others,5
Chalmers has succeeded in turning zombie intuitions into a
philosophically significant challenge. Let me sketch the strategy
deployed by the sophisticated anti-physicalist: First, concede that
gaps between conceivability and possibility occur, but offer a
ADVICE FOR PHYSICALISTS 19
diagnosis of when such gaps occur when they do. Second, insist
that upon conceiving P, we can coherently deny that P is possible
only insofar as one of the gap-explaining reasons provided by
the diagnosis is available. Third, move the dialectic forward by
maintaining that none of the legitimate gap-explaining reasons are
available when it comes to zombie intuitions.
There are two key moves that Chalmers deploys in this
connection. First, he distinguishes between positive and negative
conceivability. Sometimes, P is conceivable on account of the fact
that we have no modal opinions either way about P. By contrast,
sometimes P is conceivable on account of the fact that it seems
clear to us that there is a way things could be where P obtains.
For our purposes, the following definitions will suffice:6 P is posit-
ively conceivable just in case one fully grasps the proposition that
P and has an intuition to the effect that P is possible. Mean-
while, P is negatively conceivable just in case one fully grasps the
proposition that P and has no intuition to the effect that not P is
necessary.7 Both the truth and falsity of Goldbach’s conjecture are
negatively conceivable. But crucially, a world of zombies is posit-
ively conceivable, and hence no gap between negative conceivability
and possibility is available to be exploited in a reply to the Zombie
Argument.8
The second move picks up on a theme in Kripke: insofar as
there is a gap between positive conceivability and possibility, it is
because we are uninformed about the actual world or else unaware
of the logical consequences of commitments that we have. Tell me
the physical facts and then, unless I am confused, it will no longer
seem that things could be such that water was not H2 O. After all, the
physical facts, when given, would put me in a position to figure out
that it was H2 O that people were drinking and bathing in, and which
was falling from the sky, and so on. Suppose (idealizing only a little)
that the description ‘stuff that people drink and bathe in and which
falls from the sky’ is the reference fixer for ‘water’, then unless I
am cognitively challenged, I will see that H2 O is identical to water.
Further, given that it is a priori that if a = b then necessarily a = b,
then unless I am cognitively challenged, I will no longer reckon that
it is possible that water be other than H2 O.9 Of course I will still be
able to conceive of a world in which people truly utter the sentence
20 JOHN HAWTHORNE
‘Water is not H2 O’, where ‘water’ is accompanied with the same

reference fixing intentions as at the actual world: but that will not
amount to my positively conceiving of a world where water is not
H2 O.10 In short, positive conceivabilities can only be knocked out
by one of two means: either by appeal to certain actual facts of which
we are uninformed or else by appeal to some cognitive oversight
whereby we fail to notice the a priori consequences of our commit-
ments. Now the physicalist thinks that insofar as one possesses all
of the physical facts about the actual world, one possesses of all
the facts about the actual world. Suppose we run with the diagnosis
of positive conceivability/possibility gaps along the lines just given.
The physicalist now has two options for explaining why zombies
are impossible even though positively conceivable: She can say that
it is because she lacks a complete physical profile of the actual
world: in the ideal limit, were she somehow to possess and grasp the
contents of a book – call it the Physical Worldbook – that described
all the physical facts, she would no longer find zombies conceivable.
Alternatively, she can say that it is because she fails to notice the a
priori consequences of her current beliefs that she is able to conceive
of zombies.
The trouble is – and here is where the anti-physicalist argu-
ment gets its bite – neither response seems very plausible. Even
if one were to possess the Physical Worldbook, it seems that one
would find zombies positively conceivable. Nor do zombie intui-
tions seem traceable to a failure to notice the a priori consequences
of our beliefs about the physical world. So the anti-physicalist seems
to have the upper hand. One could of course imagine that some
futuristic physics a priori entails facts about experience in ways
that we haven’t imagined. And one could of course imagine that
there is some subtle a priori argument from the physical facts to
experiential ones whose force we have been too stupid to recognize.
But these moves seem rather desperate ones for the physicalist to
build a world view upon. In sum: given the diagnosis of positive
conceivaibility/possibility gaps just provided, it would appear that
anti-physicalism is in a very strong position.
How should the physicalist proceed in the face of this genuinely
serious challenge? The physicalist ought to concede that the experi-
ential facts are not a priori deducible from the Physical Worldbook.
The trick is to find a way of conceding this point without thereby

seeming to posit mysterious brute necessary connections between
experiential and physical facts. In what follows I shall develop
two physicalistic strategies that (a) deny the a priori deducibility
of experiential facts from the physical worldbook but which (b)
do not invoke necessities that are mysterious. The strategies rely
respectively on what I shall call Totality-Dependent Concepts and
Demonstrative Concepts. Both Totality-Dependent Concepts and
Demonstrative Concepts are unproblematic and unmysterious from
the point of view of physicalism, and are nevertheless such that their
extension is not a priori deducible from the Physical Worldbook. My
advice for physicalists on the score of the Zombie Argument is to
try to assimilate concepts pertaining to experience to one or both of
these categories of concept.
1.2. Totality-Dependent Concepts

1.2.1. Pain*
Let us say that a concept F is Totality Dependent just in case (a)
one cannot deduce from the Physical Worldbook that F is true of
anything described by that Worldbook but (b) the Physical World-
book combined with the information that the Physical Worldbook
constitutes a complete compendium of the facts of the world allows
one to deduce that F is true of certain things described by that World-
book. In effect, one needs a totality or “that’s all” fact about the
Physical Worldbook in order to figure out that a Totality Dependent
concept is true of some particular thing mentioned in it.11 Permit me
to fashion one such concept, which I shall express using the term
‘pain*’.
‘Pain*’ is true of certain mental states. Which ones? Well, if we
enjoy non-physical phenomenal states that are caused by brain states
and we stand in a basic, non-physical relation of acquaintance12
to those states, “pain*” is true of some of those states. In partic-
ular, if there are such emergent phenomenal states, I stipulate that
‘pain*’ is true of the kind of phenomenal state typically produced
by being drawn and quartered, having one’s teeth drilled, stubbing
one’s toe . . . (where the list is filled out by the kinds of things that
folk psychology reckons to be the typical causes of pain).
22 JOHN HAWTHORNE
With this stipulation in place, we can confidently assert the

following indicative conditional:
(IC1) If we are acquainted with tokens of a kind of emergent
non-physical mental state that is typically caused in the
way that folk think pain is caused, then those tokens are
pain*s.
That’s one way that ‘pain*’ might be true of things. However, there
is a second. (My word, my choice. The controversial bit comes
later). Suppose the world contains nothing but physical states. That
is, a full specification of the facts that obtain at the world will include
a lengthy list of physical states of affairs – the contents of the Phys-
ical Worldbbook – followed by a second order “That’s all” clause
at the end. I stipulate that if the world is like that, then ‘pain*’
will express a kind of physical state. In particular, it will denote
the kind of physical state that best realizes the functional role that
folk psychology typically associates with pain. (There may be more
than one kind of physical state that, in human beings, realizes the
relevant functional profile. If so, I stipulate that if that scenario is
actual, then all of these are pain*s.)
With these further stipulations in place, we can confidently assert
another indicative conditional:
(IC2) If the world is merely physical, then pain*s are tokens
of the kind(s) of physical state that plays the pain role in
us.
Let me also stipulate that ‘pain*’ is to behave rigidly. If it desig-
nates an emergent non-physical state type K at the actual world,
then, necessarily, pain*s are K s. And if ‘pain*’ designates physical
state type P at the actual world, then, necessarily, pain*s are P s.13
1.2.2. Zombie*s
Let me introduce a second term, “zombie*”. Some possible being is
a zombie* just in case it lacks pain* but is nevertheless a physical
duplicate of a human being that is in pain*. Are zombie*s possible?
Well, prima facie, zombie*s are possible. We can well imagine that
at the actual world, pain*s are states that are causally generated by,
but not identical to, brain states. Assuming (with orthodoxy) that the
nomological relation holds with less than metaphysical necessity,
this actual world hypothesis implies that there are other possible
worlds where physical duplicates of humans do not have pain*s.14
Can we confidently assert now that a zombie* is possible? Of
course not. The prima facie case for possible zombie*s traded on a
certain hypothesis about the actual world. While it may be that in
the actual world pain*s are emergent states to which we stand in
an emergent acquaintance relation (see IC1), it may be instead that
in the actual world pain*s are physical states (see IC2). If the latter
scenario holds, then ‘pain*’ rigidly denotes a physical state type
that physical duplicates of people in pain* will also possess (else
they wouldn’t be physical duplicates). Given that scenario, then it
will not be possible that someone physically duplicate a being in
pain* but himself lack pain*. So on that scenario, zombie*s will not
be possible. In short: Whether zombie*s are possible depends upon
how the actual world turns out.
1.2.3. Pain*, Primary and Secondary Intension

We can readily frame what we now know about pain* in terms of the
semantic machinery of primary and secondary intension utilized by
David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind.15 Here is his introduction
of the topic:
. . . there are two quite distinct patterns of dependence of the referent of a concept
on the state of the world. First, there is the dependence by which reference is fixed
in the actual world, depending on how the world turns out: if it turns out one way,
a concept will pick out one thing, but if it turns out another way, the concept will
pick out something else. Second, there is the dependence by which reference in
counterfactual worlds is determined, given that reference in the actual world is
already fixed. Corresponding to each of these dependences is an intension, which
I will call the primary and secondary intensions respectively.
To illustrate: Suppose a name ‘Goliath’ has its reference fixed by

‘the tallest man in Alaska on Jan 1 1990’ and that Bill is the tallest
man in Alaska on Jan 1 1990 at the actual world. The primary
intension of ‘Goliath’ will deliver as referent the tallest man in
Alaska on Jan 1 1990 for each world at which there is no tie, and
nothing for each world where there is a tie (or at which there are
no people in Alaska on the relevant date). The secondary intension
will deliver Bill for each world that Bill exists, and nothing for
every other world. The primary intension considers each world as
actual and considers what ‘Goliath’ refers to on that hypothesis. The
24 JOHN HAWTHORNE
secondary intension treats each merely possible world as non-actual

and considers which thing in each of those worlds to call ‘Goliath’
against the background of the actual world where ‘Goliath’ refers to
Bill. The secondary intension will thus reflect (a) the actual world
referent and (b) the fact that ‘Goliath’ designates rigidly. In a world
where a name ‘Titan’ is introduced by the same reference fixer, but
refers to an individual other than Bill, ‘Titan’ will have the same
primary intension as ‘Goliath’ but a different secondary intension.
How do these distinctions apply to ‘pain*’? Suppose that at the
actual world ‘pain*’ picks out an emergent non-physical state K.
The secondary intension of ‘pain*’ is then a function that in any
possible context treats all and only K’s as pain*s. It follows that
there are possible zombie*s that physically duplicate me and which,
evaluated by the secondary intension of ‘pain*’ lack pain*. They
will themselves use a term that enjoys the primary intension of
‘pain*’, captured by IC1 and IC2. However, ‘pain*’ in the zombie*s
mouth will have a different secondary intension from ‘pain*’ in
our own. Why? Because the zombie will rigidly designate a phys-
ical state type by ‘pain*’ and this will be reflected by a different
secondary intension.16 Both I and the zombie* will utter the words
‘I can imagine that there are possible physical duplicates of myself
that lack pain*’. Owing to the differing secondary intensions, it now
turns out that the zombie*s utterance is a case of conceiving some-
thing that is impossible, while my utterance expresses something
that is both conceivable and possible.
That story depended, of course, upon the assumption that in the
actual world I rigidly designate an emergent nonphysical state. If at
the actual world I rigidly designate a physical state type (or some
disjunction of such), then the tables are turned. Zombie*s are not
possible. On this actual world hypothesis, I suffer the fate of the
zombie*s in the first story, viz: When I say ‘There are possible
physical duplicates of myself that lack pain*’, what I say expresses
something that is conceivable but impossible.17 Thus – and this will
be crucial – someone who believed that the world is merely physical
would have no trouble admitting to the conceivability of zombie*s.
Further, he would have no trouble conceding that no list of physical
states conceptually require one to predicate ‘pain*’ of some state
on that list, since no list of physical states by itself guarantees that
the world is merely physical. The fact remains that if the world is
merely physical, pain*s are physical and zombie*s are impossible.18
1.2.4. Pain* and Zombies

The reader will readily anticipate how a physicalist strategy for
responding to the zombie argument can be constructed out of the
preceeding reflections. Suppose our concept of pain is something
like the concept of pain*. We will admit that zombies are positively
conceivable, but will not be confident that zombies are possible.
In particular, we will not be confident that zombies would remain
conceivable were to be fully informed about the actual world, even
though we will be confident that zombies would remain conceivable
were we to be given the Physical Worldbook and told that its
contents were true. (Recall: no list of physical states obtaining at the
actual world required us to predicate ‘pain*’ of any physical state.
But if we are informed that the actual world is merely physical, we
shall be compelled to conclude that ‘pain*’ is true of certain physical
states – namely, the ones that enjoy the role that folk psychology
associates with ‘pain’.)
In sum: If pain is something like pain*, one would expect to
be able to find zombies positively conceivable but would see no
metaphysical bite in that finding.
But is our concept of pain relevantly like pain*? There is a
reasonably good case for thinking that it is. Sure enough, we are
not altogether confident of the counterfactual conditional “Were the
world merely physical, there would still be pain”. But we are not
altogether confident either of the counterfactual conditional “Were
the world merely physical, there would be pain*”. After all, if we
are actually acquainted with emergent non-physical states, the latter
counterfactual is false. So far, we have parity. Consider further the
following pair of indicative conditionals, which are the counterparts
of IC1 and IC2:
IC1 If we are acquainted with tokens of a kind of emergent
non-physical mental state typically caused in the way that
folk think pain is caused, then those tokens are pains.
IC2 If the world is merely physical, then pains are tokens of
the kind(s) of physical state that plays the pain role in us.
26 JOHN HAWTHORNE
IC1 appears very plausible. In particular, Chalmers could hardly

disagree with it. How about IC2 ?. Well, suppose an oracle tells
you tomorrow that the world is merely physical. Will you conclude
that there is no pain, that your earlier self was making a mistake
in ascribing pain to himself on occasion? No. You will remain
convinced that you do feel pain sometimes and will reckon as pain
whatever plays the pain role.19 (Relatedly, you will form the belief
that being conscious of that state is not a non-physical, unanalyzable
acquaintance relation, but instead some sort of causal/functional
relationship to the state.)20 Once again we have parity with pain*.
This, I say, is all good primary intension-theoretic reasoning, based
upon thinking a priori about what to say if certain states of affairs
turned out to be actual.
An objector21 might claim that the indicative conditional IC2 has
nothing like an a priori status. If an oracle told me that the world
is merely physical, the objection runs, I will only be tempted to
conclude that there is pain and it is whatever plays the pain role
insofar as I already have a posteriori knowledge that I or other
people have been in pain. Consider the indicative conditional in
abstraction from such contingent empirical information and IC2
will not seem true. This objection does not strike me as at all
decisive. We can agree that there are pains if the predicate ‘pain’,
as used by us, is true of certain events. And it does seem that if the
actual world is merely physical, then it is a priori pretty obvious that
the predicate ‘pain’ expresss some physical/cum/functional property
instantiated by certain events.22
So is pain a functional concept on this gloss? If a functional
concept is one such that a functional description is a priori suffi-
cient for its application, then pain is not a functional concept: the
primary intension reckons as relevant such additional information as
whether the world is merely physical or whether there are emergent
nonphysical states.
We can make the current view plausible in two stages. First,
consider what to say about ‘I am in pain’ in the mouth of the zombie.
On the kind of view being currently advanced, when a zombie utters
the words, ‘I am in pain’, the zombie expresses a truth. Chalmers
disagrees,23 insisting that the zombie’s concept is ‘not a functional
concept’ and that the zombie intends to be referring to a property
that is something over and above any property given by a functional

role. I agree that ‘pain’ is not a functional concept for zombies,
supposing they are possible; the concept they associate with ‘pain’
permits the property of pain to be something over and above phys-
ical/functional facts. I disagree that the zombie (or indeed ourselves)
has a concept of pain that requires that the property picked out by
‘pain’ be something over and above a physical property.
Now of course the zombie finds the scenario expressed by ‘There
could be physical duplicates of myself that lack pain’ to express a
positively conceivable state of affairs. But that is because the zombie
would lack a certain crucial bit of information about his own world –
that it is merely physical. Give the zombie that piece of information
and I submit that he would conclude that there are pains and that
‘There are possible physical duplicates of myself that lack pain’ was
false. The issue is, admittedly, a delicate one. Chalmers is inclined
to claim that the zombie is positively committed to the idea that ‘is
in pain’ refers to something over and above any physical state of
affairs. On the conceptual gloss currently being advanced, a weaker
claim is true: the zombie embraces a conceptual scheme that permits
that ‘is in pain’ and so on to refer to something over and above
any physical state of affairs. Both views agree that the zombie’s
concept of pain is not straightforwardly functionally or otherwise
physicalistically definable. My gloss has the advantage of explaining
the faulty positive conceivability of which the zombie is guilty while
at the same time reckoning ordinary ‘pain’ ascriptions in the mouth
of the zombie true. That faulty positive conceivability gets explained
in a perfectly legitimate way, viz, as stemming from misinformation
about the actual world. The second step in the dialectic is clear
enough. Grant the totality-dependent gloss on the concept of pain
and what goes for the zombie in the context of the above discus-
sion goes for us on the hypothesis that the actual world is merely
physical.
One final point to be made in favor of the current gloss is that
it seems a priori eminently possible that an oracle tells us that
the actual world is merely physical, even in light of our empir-
ical knowledge that there are pains. One would thus like a view
according to which the proposition that there are pains and the
proposition that the actual world is merely physical are not a priori
28 JOHN HAWTHORNE
inconsistent. Views which offer a straightforward functional defini-

tion of pain do this. But they do this at the cost of making the positive
conceivability of zombies trade on a straightforward conceptual
confusion, when it does not seem at all that it does. The current
view renders the relevant propositions a priori cotenable without
indicting us of conceptual confusion when we find zombies posi-
tively conceivable. If what we conceive is not possible, it is because
we lack a crucial bit of information about the actual world, not
because we are unaware of a straightforwardly reductive definition
of our experiential concepts.24
There is, then, a good case to be made for the view that the
concept of pain is something like the concept of pain*. In particular,
it is plausible that our concept of pain licenses IC1 and IC2 above –
and if that is so, the Zombie Argument can safely be defused by the
physicalist. Two final disclaimers:
First. You might think that the concept of pain can’t be like
pain* since ‘pain*’ was introduced via a disjunction of complex
descriptive stipulations, while ‘pain’ was not so introduced. Here,
I can cite Chalmers in my own defense:
. . . descriptions play no essential part in this framework; I use them merely to
flesh out some of the character of the relevant functions from possible worlds to
extensions. It is the function itself, rather than any summarizing description that
is truly central.25
Obviously, ‘pain’ was never explicitly introduced via a complex

disjunctive stipulation. So, clearly, the term ‘pain*’ differs in that
respect from ‘pain’. But all that is quite consistent with the claim
that ‘pain’ and ‘pain*’ enjoy the same (or relevantly similar)
primary and secondary intensions.26
Second: It might be urged that to possess the concept of pain one
must have certain recognitional, discriminatory and/or imaginative
capacities. For example: to possess the concept of pain, one must
be such that when pain is tokened in you then, in normal circum-
stances, you are disposed to have a thought of the form “I am in
pain’ which is elicited by such tokenings. Here’s another candidate
requirement: To count as having the concept of pain, one must be
able to imagine oneself to be in pain by some appropriate sort of
simulation. Nowhere in my account of what it is to grasp the concept
of pain did I invoke possession conditions of this sort. Isn’t that a

problem?
Not really. With regard to these kinds of capacities, I needn’t
take a stand on what is essential to possessing the concept of pain
(assuming there is a unique precisification of ‘the concept of pain’).
The main line of thought is not at all indicted by such requirements,
since they needn’t at all conflict with the primary intension that I
have associated with ‘pain’ (and which defused the Zombie Argu-
ment). Analogy: Someone might be very good at deducing that ‘is
circular’ is true of a thing from various physical descriptions of the
descriptions of a thing and indeed, might associate exactly the same
primary intension with ‘circular’ as we do. Such a person might
nevertheless have a rather impoverished set of recognitional capa-
cities. Suppose, for example, that the person’s ability to discriminate
circularity by touch was shaky at best. Would such a person fully
grasp the concept of circularity? I am inclined to be a little impatient
with such questions. But even supposing we are confident that the
person’s grip on the concept ‘circularity’ is in some natural sense
incomplete in that case, that would not at all mean that the primary
intension that the person associated with ‘circular’ was importantly
different from our own.
1.2.5. Objection: That’s The Wrong Sort of Physicalism

Suppose the world is merely physical. ‘Pain*’ will, then, rigidly
designate a certain kind of physical state P which plays a certain
sort of role in our cognitive architecture. Some physicalists will say
that ‘pain’ doesn’t work that way, invoking one of the following two
sorts of worlds:
(a) There are worlds where P is instantiated but where its
tokens do not play the role that we associate with ‘pain’.
Those tokens are pain*s. But do we really want to say that
they are pains?
(b) There are worlds where tokens of a different kind of phys-
ical state, P2, play the pain role. Those tokens are not
pain*s. But do we wish to deny that they are pains?
So perhaps ‘pain’ and ‘pain*’ come apart.
Reply:
30 JOHN HAWTHORNE
As far as my dialectic with Chalmers goes, these concerns are not

very much to the point. To illustrate, let me fashion three concepts,
‘pain*1 ’, ‘pain*2 ’ and pain*3 ’.
These concepts coincide on
(IC1) If we are acquainted with tokens of a kind of emergent
non-physical mental state typically caused in the way that
folk think pain is caused, then those tokens are pain*s.
(where ‘pain*s’ can be read as either ‘pain*1 ’ or ‘pain*2 ’
or ‘pain*3 ’)
However, they behave differently on the hypothesis that the actual
world is merely physical. Pain*1 is just the pain* described above,
and so has it that
(IC2) If the world is merely physical, then pain*1 s are tokens
of the kind(s) of physical state that plays the pain role in
us.
Given the rigidity of ‘pain*’, we can say – using Kaplan’s style of
terminology27 – that if the world is merely physical, pain* is dthat
kind of physical state that plays the pain role in us.
On the hypothesis that the actual world is merely physical, pain*2
and pain*3 offer somewhat different recommendations.
(IC3) If the world is merely physical then pain*2 s are tokens of
the kind that play the pain role in the population to which
the individual in which the token occurs belongs. Thus
pain*s may token one physical kind in one population, a
different physical kind in a different population.
If physical state P plays the pain role in us and the world is merely
physical, it is still false to think of pain*2 as identical to that property
(and hence wrong to think of ‘pain*2 ’ as rigid), since some other
state-type could play the pain role, in which case its tokens would
be pain*2 s.
(IC4) If the world is merely physical then pain*3 s are tokens
that satisfy the following two conditions: (a) They are
tokens of the kind of physical state P that plays the pain
role in us and (b) P plays the pain role in the population to
which the individual that enjoys the token of P belongs.
If physical state P plays the pain role in us and the world is merely
physical, it is still false to think of pain*3 as identical to that property
(and wrong to think of ‘pain*3 ’ as rigidly denoting that property),
since if that kind hadn’t played the pain role its instances wouldn’t
have been pain*3s.
It does not much matter to me whether our concept of pain is
more like pain*1 , pain*2 or pain*3 (or indeed whether it is vague as
between them28 ): On the score of zombie arguments, we can make
the same moves in each case. Each of the three candidate concepts
will apply perfectly well to any physical duplicates of ourselves on
the hypothesis that the actual world is merely physical. What matters
is that our concept of pain is such as to have a primary intension
that endorses an indicative conditional of the following form: If
the actual world is merely physical, ‘pain’ is true of such and such
physical states. Hence the objection that motivates this section is
irrelevant: if pain is any one of pain*1 , pain*2 or pain*3 (or anything
else that licenses the relevant kind of indicative conditional), then
we can safely conclude that if the actual world is merely physical,
there are pains but zombies are impossible.
1.3. Demonstrative Concepts

1.3.1. The Need for Centered Worldbooks
A second strategy for the physicalist exploits a lacuna that Chalmers
tries unsuccessfully to patch up. Suppose it is a fact that I and I
alone am in the middle of Kansas. Then I am identical to dthat man
who is in the middle of Kansas. Nevertheless, I will find it positively
conceivable that I am not identical to dthat man who is in the middle
of Kansas. Availability of the Physical Worldbook (and even the
information that the Physical Worldbook lists all the states of affairs)
will not knock out the possibility of the situation that is positively
conceived. Nor should it: for the Physical Worldbook will not tell
me which of the physical objects I am identical to. Of course, we
are not now tempted to posit objects or properties unmentioned in
the Physical Worldbook on account of the fact that I cannot a priori
recover from it the information that I am identical to dthat man who
is in the middle of Kansas.
Chalmers is aware of all this. Accordingly, his framework has
a dimension of complexity that has so far been untouched. Some
32 JOHN HAWTHORNE
conceived of situations that are compatible with the Physical World-

book for our world are shown to be impossible by the Centred
Worldbook,29 which in effect specifies as additional information
which person is you and which time is now. The idea is that the
actual world reference of my concepts can be a priori determined
from some complete specification of the groundfloor facts coupled
with a specification of which person is me and which time is now.
Give me the Centred Worldbook and I will no longer, in the envis-
aged scenario, find it conceivable that I am not dthat man who is
in the middle of Kansas. The centred worldbook will tell me that I
am in the middle of Kansas now. Using the fact that if a = b then
necessarily a = b I can then infer that I couldn’t be distinct from
dthat man who is in the middle of Kansas.
In ‘Demonstratives’,30 David Kaplan distinguished two kinds of
indexicals. First, there are pure indexicals which require no associ-
ated demonstration to acquire a referent. These include ‘now’, ‘I’
here’, ‘tomorrow’ and so on. Second, there are true demonstratives
which require an associated demonstration in order to acquire a
referent. These include non-anaphoric uses of ‘That’, ‘This’ and so
on. The place of true demonstratives is particularly important in this
context, since at least some experience-describing language seems
to make significant use of them, viz: ‘Thus is what it is like to feel
pain’ and so on. Even if one is happy as a physicalist about the story
given earlier for the concept of pain, one needs to have a treatment
ready to hand for such demonstrative thoughts. Those thoughts are,
indeed, especially crucial to the dialectic, since our confidence that
microphysical ominiscience does not tell us all we need to know
is articulated most vividly in terms of such demonstrative thoughts,
viz: “Mary still does not know that pain feels thus”. The story given
about pain in the previous section does not seem sufficient to provide
an account of the content of such knowledge31 (though as we shall
see, the phenomenon of Totality Dependence can still be exploited
in this context).
Prima facie, it is not clear that one can semantically evaluate
thoughts and sentences that involve true demonstratives given a
centred worldbook. Suppose there are two cats in one’s vicinity. One
thinks a thought of the form ‘That cat is nice’. A centred worldbook
will describe the cats, will locate oneself and will locate the present.
But it is at least not obvious that this will enable one to semantically
evaluate the relevant thought, since it is at least not obvious that one
will be able to recover the demonstratum of the true demonstrative
from the centred worldbook. Let a centred-plus worldbook be a
worldbook that provides an individual, a time and also associates
a demonstratum for each non-vacuous true demonstrative deployed
by the centred individual.32 Suppose I think to myself ‘That is a
ghost’ where in fact, unbenowst to me, what I demonstrate is a
shadow on the wall. Given the centred worldbook, I may still find it
postively conceivable that dthat shadow on the wall is distinct from
dthat thing I am representing as a ghost. But given the centred plus
worldbook, I will no longer find that conceivable, since the centred
worldbook will tell me that the demonstratum of my ghostly thought
is a shadow. The faulty conceivability once again stems from ignor-
ance about the actual world; in this case, it stems from ignorance
about what object is, as a matter of fact, the demonstratum of a
demonstative thought.
With all this in place, the physicalist has an altogether rather
obvious diagnosis available of what is going on with zombie intu-
itions. Suppose I think to myself ‘There could be physical duplicates
of me that don’t feel thus’, where I attend to some aspect of exper-
ience as a means of associating a demonstatum with ‘Thus’. This
will turn out to be a standard case, according to the physicalist,
of an illusory possibility that has its roots in ignorance about the
actual demonstrata of one’s demonstrative thoughts. Were I to be
given the centred plus worldbook, I would no longer find the zombie
intuition compelling: I would see from that worldbook that ‘thus’ as
it appears in ‘feels thus’ demonstrates some kind of neurological or
functional property (i.e. whatever property the centred plus world-
book tells you is the true demonstratum), and one will then explain
away the intuition as stemming from ignorance about the actual
demonstatum. To respond, the anti-physicalist has to marshall some
a priori argument to show that it is incoherent to suppose that the
centred plus worldbook would identify a physicalistically accept-
able property as the demonstratum of ‘thus’. But what would such an
argument look like? One can’t say “There is no way that the centred
plus worldbook would associate a physical property with ‘thus’,
since I find it conceivable that those physical properties could exist
34 JOHN HAWTHORNE
without the referent of ‘thus’ existing”. That is no more compelling

than the argument ‘It is absolutely inconceivable that the centred
plus worldbook would associate a shadow as the associated demon-
statum of ‘That ghost’, since I find it conceivable that that shadow
exist without that ghost’.33
This account also provides a natural account of what Mary learns
when, with microphysical omniscience already in place, she sees
red for the first time.34 Consider Mary before she sees red. Let us
suppose her to have absorbed the contents of the physical world-
book. Let us suppose further that she knows what the demonstrata
of our demonstative thoughts are. Supposing that when humans utter
‘Thus is what it is like to see red’, human beings typically refer
to physical property F by ‘Thus’. What exactly does Mary learn
when she learns what it’s like to see red? She already knows which
property is picked out by thoughts of that form and has readily
anticipated that if she ever gets around to thinking a thought of
that form, she will pick out F as well. So what is there to learn?
The physicalist has a readily intelligible model at hand. Suppose I
know it is going to rain tomorrow. Suppose I know that when people
tomorrow think ‘It is raining now’, they will think something true.
We can all see that on some perfectly natural way of individuating
knowledge (that is suitably fine-grained), we don’t now know what
my later self knows when my later self thinks to itself ‘It is raining
now’. Mary undergoes an analogous epistemic transition when she
moves from a recognition that other people truly think ‘Thus is what
it is like to feel red’ when suitably related to F-ness to being in a
position to truly think that thought herself.
The success or failure of this physicalist strategy turns on the
strength of two kinds of anti-physicalist criticisms, to which I now
turn.
1.3.2. The Criticism From Epistemic Progress35

When I move from knowledge that is encoded by ‘It will rain
tomorrow’ to knowledge encoded by ‘It is raining today’, I do in
a useful sense gain new knowledge; but I do not, intuitively, seem
to have made significant epistemic progress. However, when Mary
actually learns what it is like to see red, it seems intuitively that
she makes massive epistemic progress. How then can the case of
Mary be assimilated to the semantic features of indexicals? Let me

elaborate a little.
In what sense is the knowledge new in the case of ‘It is raining
today’? Well, the primary intension of ‘It is raining now’ is not the
same as the primary intension of ‘It will rain tomorrow’, notwith-
standing the fact that both utterances are made true by the same
raining event. In what sense is the knowledge not new? Well, given
the imagined contexts of utterance, ‘It is raining now’ and ‘It will
rain tomorrow’ will have exactly the same secondary intension:
in that sense, an old fact is encoded in a new way, when, having
asserted ‘It will rain tomorrow’ yesterday, I assert ‘It is raining
today’ today. It may be urged that our sense of massive epistemic
progress in the case of Mary militates against a gloss according to
which there is any good sense in which the knowledge is not new.
But if the knowledge Mary gains is in no good sense knowledge of
some fact she already knew, then physicalism has to be wrong.
The response founders an impovrished diet of examples. It is
true enough that in the case of ‘now’ and ‘tomorrow’, our sense
of epistemic progress is decidedly thin. That is because the shift
occurs within the class of temporal indexicals in such a way that
the cognitive transition from the knowledge encoded by ‘It will
rain tomorrow’ to the knowledge encoded by ‘It is raining today’
is relatively effortless. That is hardly the case with all epistemic
transitions from one type of demonstration of a physicalistically
acceptable property to another type of demonstration of the same
property. Here is a useful case in point. Suppose Mary is trying to
figure out how to balance on a balance beam and then finally figures
it out. Elated, she makes a judgement of the form ‘Thus is a way of
balancing on a balance beam’.36 Two features of this judgement are
worth noting.
First, the referent of ‘Thus’ is not readily recoverable from the
centred physical worldbook. For all the centred physical worldbook
says (and here the totality issue is relevant once more), it may be that
in addition to the physical stuff, there exists some non-physical ecto-
plasm that works in concert with the physical world and for all the
worldbook says, the technique whereby one balances on a balance
beam may involve a certain spinning of the ectoplasm. Mary will,
then, find the following conceivable: A zombie might balance on the
36 JOHN HAWTHORNE
balance beam, but not balance thus’. Further, even given the centred
physical worldbook combined with the information that there are no
other things or properties, it may be unclear what part of the physical
process involved in balancing on the balance beam is to count as the
referent of ‘Thus’.
No one thinks, however, that thoughts of the form ‘Thus is a
way of balancing on a balance beam’ present a serious problem for
physicalism. While a Cartesian Dualist may well expect ectoplasmic
involvement in the referent of ‘thus’, as it figures in ‘Thus is how I
balance on the balance beam,’ we would not think the physicalist
particularly embarrassed in his expectation that the centred plus
worldbook would provide a physical demonstatum for some such
use of ‘Thus’.37
Second, we intuitively think that there is some perfectly good
sense in which real epistemic progress is made when Mary comes to
know something of the form ‘Thus is a way to balance on a balance
beam’, viz a viz the state of information that Mary possesses prior
to her acrobatic success. Of course, there is a sense in which there
is no epistemic advance – Mary, after all, may well merely encode a
state of affairs that she had already represented as obtaining. That
is, she may well have already tokened a thought with the same
secondary intension as the one that gives voice to her recognizing,
from the inside, a way of balancing on a balance beam. But in some
decent sense, there is a real epistemic advance. We sense this much
more strongly in this case than in the ‘tomorrow’-‘now’ case, since
the cognitive transition from ‘It will rain tomorrow’ to ‘It will rain
today’ is much more straightforward than the cognitive transition
from ‘Physical process XYZ is a way of balancing on a balance
beam’ to ‘Aha, thus (used with a practical mode of presentation38 )
is a way of balancing on a balance beam’.
1.3.3. Are Experiential Demonstratives Special?

My second strategy for physicalists tried to assimilate some
problematic experiential demonstratives to other kinds of demon-
trative as a way of rendering them tractable for physicalism. A
second type of anti-physicalist criticism attempts to find some deep
and important disanalogy between the way that experiential demon-
stratives work and the way that other demonstratives work. There
are two salient ways of motivating such a thought. Both fail.
One might first try to make heavy weather of the following
putative disanalogy: reference-failure occurs in the case of ordinary
demonstratives, but never occurs in the case of experiential demon-
statives. We need not worry about whether, were this disanalogy
real, it would make real trouble for physicalism, since it is illusory.
Two points are relevant. First, reference failure may occur even
when experiential demonstratives are used. Particularly relevant
here is are what Chalmers calls ‘Dancing Qualia’,39 cases where
there is quale shift that is unnoticed due to the fact that the new
quale plays the same functional role with regard to one’s cognitive
archictecture as the old one. Suppose that during the brief time
that it takes to produce the judgement ‘Thus is how I feel’, there
is large-scale qualia dancing going on, even though one believes
(mistakenly) that one’s experiential life is pretty much constant. In
that case, it is very plausible to maintain that ‘thus’ fails to pick
out any quality at all.40 Second, there are demonstrative thoughts
that are physicalistically unproblematic, where reference failure is
scarcely thinkable. Consider, for example, thoughts of the form
‘There is no one there (pointing)’. Allowing for a little vagueness,
it is scarcely thinkable that the thought will be defective on account
of reference failure for the ‘there’.41
A second line of anti-physicalist argument proceeds via a putative
link between the centred physical worldbook and the centred plus
physical worldbook. In the case of standard demonstratives, it does
seem that the demonstratum mentioned in the centred plus phys-
ical worldbook can be recovered a priori from the centred physical
worldbook. Let us return to the thought ‘That cat is nice’, uttered
in the presence of two cats. In the standard case, the associated
demonstratum is determined by an act of pointing, whose direction
(combined with certain relevant intentions) selects one of the cats
as the demonstratum. The direction of an act of pointing will be
contained in the centred physical worldbook: so the demonstratum
mentioned in the centred plus physical worldbook can, perhaps, be
recovered from the centred worldbook. Perhaps it will be maintained
that demonstrations of experience are special in that there is no
chance of recovering their demonstrata from the centred physical
38 JOHN HAWTHORNE
worldbook, whereas in every case where it is clear that a physical

object is demonstrated, the demonstatum can be recovered from
that worldbook. This line of thought is also wrongheaded. Let us
remind ourselves of the readily intelligible case mentioned earlier
whereby a shadow is demonstrated by ‘That is a ghost’. (Alterna-
tively, consider the thought, ‘Perhaps that thing that just scared me
was a ghost’, where the thought does not require a positive commit-
ment to the demonstratum being a ghost.) Will the centred physical
worldbook require that one acknowledge the demonstatum to be a
shadow (supposing it is in fact a shadow)? No, for it is compat-
ible with the centred physical worldbook that there are some ghosts
that exist in addition to the physical furniture of the world and
that there is an appearing relation such that one ghost just stood
in the appearing relation to oneself. Recalling a theme explored
earlier, the indexical ‘That’ which figures in ‘That is a ghost’, is
totality dependent with respect to both the physical worldbook and
the centred physical worldbook. Tell me that the centred physical
worldbook encodes all the facts, and I will conclude that the relevant
indexical refers to a shadow. But without such information I will
not be able to determine with certainty what the demonstratum
was. Isn’t the same true of ‘Thus’ as it appears in, say, ‘My pain
feels thus’? Provide me with the centred physical worldbook and I
certainly will not be able to determine the demonstratum with any
certainty. But tell me that the centred physical worldbook encodes
all that there is and I will be compelled to suppose that the ‘Thus’
picks out a physical property. That I found it positively conceivable
that all the physical properties obtain without the referent of ‘Thus’
obtaining will not in this context restrain me from identifying the
demonstratum with a physical property any more than the positive
conceivability of all the physical states of affairs existing without the
referent of ‘That’ – in ‘That is a ghost’ – existing ought to restrain
me from identifying the demonstatum of ‘That’ with a physical
thing when informed that the world is merely physical.
2. PART TWO: THE QUIDDITY ARGUMENT
2.1. Background
To begin, I shall clarify the concept of a quiddity. Let the term ‘mass
role’ refers to the role that mass plays in the natural order. According
to what we can call ‘anti-quidditism’, to be mass is just to be the
property that plays the mass role. Nothing other than mass could
play the mass role. And there is nothing more to being mass than
playing the mass role. By contrast, the quidditist believes that the
property of mass cannot be analyzed in terms of the mass role and
this for one of the following two reasons:
(a) While mass necessarily plays the mass role, there is more
to being mass (its intrinsic nature – in scholastic lingo, its
quiddity) than playing the mass role. Something could play the
mass role without being mass because that role is necessary but
not sufficient for being mass.
(b) ‘The mass role’ is merely a reference fixer for ‘mass’. It is
contingent a priori that mass plays the mass role, but meta-
physically possible that mass – the property rigidly designated
by ‘mass’– play a different role. What would make it mass in a
world where it played a different role? Well, the intrinsic char-
acter – the quiddity – of the property that constitutes being mass
would be shared as between this world and the world where the
role differs.
As it turns out, Chalmers is willing to acknowledge that experi-
ential properties are physical properties. This acknowledgement
occurs however in the context of a quidditivist metaphysic of the
physical world. Here is his gloss on a quidditistic physicalism about
phenomenal properties:
. . . it might be that for something to qualify as an electron in a counterfactual
world, it is not sufficient that it be causally related to other physical entities in
the way that an electron is. Some hidden essence of electronhood might also be
required. . . . The same might go for properties such as mass. . . . The essen-
tial nature of electrons or of mass would then be hidden to physical theory,
which characterizes electrons or of mass only extrinsically. If so, it might be that
the relevant essential properties are themselves phenomenal or protophenomenal
properties, so that their instantiations could guarantee the existence of conscious-
ness in our world. . . . Even if we allow that certain hidden properties could
40 JOHN HAWTHORNE
be constitutive of physical properties, the difference between this view and the
property dualism that I have advocated is small. It remains the case that the
world has phenomenal properties that are not fixed by the properties that physics
reveals. After ensuring that a world is identical to ours from the standpoint of our
physical theories, God has to expend further effort to make that world identical
to ours across the board. The dualism of “physical” and “non-physical” proper-
ties is replaced on this view by a dualism of “accessible” and “hidden” physical
properties, but the essential point remains.42
So Chalmers will, after all, allow ‘pain’ to rigidly designate an

instantiated physical property.43 It seems, then, that Chalmers can
allow, after all, that pain and pain* coincide. So why does Chalmers
not straightforwardly declare himself fully open to a type-identity
version of physicalism about sensations?
Well it is clear enough that Chalmers does not consider himself
a run of the mill physicalist, even on the type-physicalist scenario:
This is because he believes that insofar as zombies – construed as
duplicates of the physical states of ourselves (quiddities and all) –
are impossible, it is because ‘pain’ denotes a physical quiddity that
is hidden from the role-revealing practice of science, but which is
accessible to introspection.
Let me distinguish two ways that one may have recourse to
quiddities in the dialectic between the physicalist and the anti-
physicalist. First, a quidditistic metaphysic might be thought of as
one way of respecting the virtues of the conceivability argument
discussed in Part One. What the positive conceivability of zombies
at least shows, it might be thought, is that there is more to the
furniture of the world than an ideal physics reveals. One might then
think of a quidditistic metaphysic as one way of making good on this
gap between experience and any physical worldbook that is revealed
by facts about what is conceivable.44 This, I think, is the role that
a quidditistic metaphysics officially plays in Chalmers’ thought. I
have argued at length, however, that the conceivability argument has
no metaphysical cash value. If this is the motivation for identifying
qualia with quiddities, it is misconceived.
Second, it might be thought that a quidditistic metaphysic that
identified experiential properties with quidditistic properties can be
motivated without appeal to standard conceivability arguments. For
isn’t it clear that physics reveals the role of intrinsic properties rather
than what properties are in themselves? And isn’t it also clear that
introspection reveals what an experiential property is in itself? Given

that pair of putative insights, we can , it seems, argue effectively that
the nature of experiential properties is not revealed by any idealized
physical science. It is this second line of thought that I shall explore
in the current section.45 Here is the argument:
(1) There is more to experiential properties than their role
(2) Physical science at best reveals the role of experiential
properties
Therefore,
There is more to experiential properties than physical
science reveals.
Further,
(3) Introspection reveals the role-transcendental nature of
experiential properties.
And so,
(4) The role-transcendent nature of experiential properties is
revealed by introspection but not revealed by physical
science.
I shall offer some critical remarks concerning the key premises.
2.2. Are Experiential Properties Role-Transcendent?

Suppose we visit an oracle who tells us that anti-quidditism is true.46
For each causally efficiacious property, necessary and sufficient
conditions for being that property could in principle be given in
role-theoretic terms. Insofar as one took oneself to be certain that
one is in pain, would one be obliged to distrust the oracle? I doubt
that our concept of pain is really so discerning about the ultimate
metaphysical structure of the world. Do we really know a priori that
if anti-quidditism is true, there is no pain? I don’t see it. Of course
it is natural to think that pain is a role-transcendent intrinsic prop-
erty. But it is similarly natural to think that shape/solidity/negative
charge/being at rest and so on are role-transcendent intrinsic prop-
erties. Under metaphysical scrutiny, however, it may turn out that
possession of these properties amounts to no more or less than
possessing properties that play a certain role. Mightn’t it turn out
that pain goes the same way under metaphysical scrutiny? I don’t
see why not. Note that premise one does not merely commit one
42 JOHN HAWTHORNE
to the thesis that pain cannot be defined by the role assigned to it

by folk psychology; it commits one to the thesis that pain is not
definable by any of its role-theoretic features, including ones that
are invisible to folk psychology. Do we really know a priori that this
is so?
Of course one can cook up a concept that is metaphysically
discerning: Let ‘pain plus’ denote anything that feels like pain and
which is identical to a role-transcendent quiddity. It is a priori,
clearly, that nothing could be pain plus and fail to be a role-
transcendent quiddity. But it seems that one can’t know from exper-
ience that one is in pain plus. The more metaphysical baggage one
builds into a mentalistic concept, the less one can discern whether
it applies to oneself simply on the basis of experience. Premise
(1) of the argument is thus certainly not plain sailing. Even more
problematic are premisses (2) and (3) as I shall now try to show.
2.3. Quiddities, Science and Introspection

Between them, premisses (2) and (3) assert that the quiddities of
experiential properties are revealed by introspection but are hidden
from science. Is this so?
By way of analogy, let us begin with haecceitism, the view that
two worlds might be alike in their qualitative profile but differ in
that, say, one contains Kant and the other not.47 (The haecceitist may
or may not also believe that there is a special property – a thisness
– unique to each individual.) Supposing that this view is true, does
it follow that the haecceistic facts about a thing – the de re facts
about which particular thing it is – are hidden from science? Well it
is certainly true that in a certain sense, science does not care about
the haecceistic facts: In a world where a different individual played
the Kant-role, science would operate in an isomorphic fashion. But
that doesn’t mean that the haecceity is hidden from the scientist.
After all, the scientist could refer to Kant in particular by some
such speech as ‘Let ‘Kant’ refer to the author of The Critique of
Pure Reason. There, you see, no problem! Further, if there was
some property of being Kant that was unique to Kant and which
constituted Kant’s “thisness”, then the scientist could refer to some
such property by an approriate reference fixer: “Let ‘Janet’ refer to
the thisness of the author of the Critique of Pure Reason.” Further
science could even afford a basis for believing in role switching

by individuals across possible worlds. So, for example, the scientist
could explain why the life history of one particular electron could
have been instead enjoyed by a different one.48 In what sense,
then, are the haecceitic facts hidden from scientists? And in what
sense, supposing that a thisness exists, is the thisness hidden from
scientists?
Perhaps we might run with the idea that there is more to accessing
a haecceity than referring to it. We may even be tempted by the
picture that while we, from the outside, can refer to a haecceity,
God could somehow take a cognitive photograph of it. It seems that
Duns Scotus entertained such a picture:
What set Scotus off from the more radical proponents of cognitio singularis was
his cognition that we lack an intuition of individuality since in its present condi-
tion (pro statu isto) the human intellect does not realise its inherent capabilities.
For him an intuition of individuality would involve a simple and formal under-
standing of merely numerically different individuals of the same kind. Beyond
knowing that this table is an individual, intuition as a grasp of haecceitas would
as easily distinguish it from an otherwise similar one put in its place as if an
altogether different kind of object had been substituted.49
We get to talk about thisnesses: But (on this picture) a more perfect
being who realizes the relevant capabilites that are unactualized in
us has an intuition of them.
Another temptation is to think that from the first person point of
view we grasp our own haecceity. So from the person point of view
I can really know what JohnHawthornehood is. You can name my
haecceity, but I can really know what it is by getting acquainted with
my quintessential meness. So among the various modes of present-
ation that afford the possibility of referring to my haecceity, one
of those modes – the one I have from a first person point of view
– is genuinely revelatory (providing an intution in Scotus’ sense).
One of the modes puts one in a position of genuinely understanding
what the haecceity is. Other modes allow one to refer to the prop-
erty without genuinely understanding what it is. On this picture I
alone – (plus God maybe) – can take a cognitive photograph of my
haecceity.
On reflection, most of us believe that these pictures are mis-
guided. If there are haecceities, then the first person point of view
affords one way of designating one of them, but there are other,
44 JOHN HAWTHORNE
equally good ways of designating them.50 We can call the modes by

different names – say ‘self-acquaintaince’, ‘acquaintance by phys-
ical demonstration’ and so on. But there is nothing epistemologic-
ally deep – corresponding to a deep distinction between revelatory
and non-revelatory modes of presentation of a single referrent – that
lies behind these labels.51
Similar remarks apply to quidditivism.52 If a different property
had played the mass role and everything else had stayed the same,
then science would have been in some important sense isomorphic.
Nevertheless, a scientist can refer to and indeed rigidly designate
the property that actually plays the mass role. And assuming that a
philosophically informed science had, say, convinced itself that the
laws true of a universal/property are only contingently true of it, that
science might even provide a basis for believing in role switching
of universals/properties. Note that, in keeping with the possibility
of role switching, we can say that some actual device is causally
sensitive to one property in particular. Of course, if the laws had
been different – whereby some role played by one property was
played by another – then that device would have been sensitive to
a different property. Be that as it may, it remains true that in the
actual world, the device is tracking the presence of – is causally
responsive to – one property. To say that the property could have
had a different causal role is one thing. To say that it is causally
inert at the actual world is quite another. The former is defensible,
the latter quite unwarranted. We can fairly say, then, that we have
measuring devices that detect the presence of various properties. In
what sense then, are the quidditive facts hidden from science?
One might insist that none of this admixture of semantic and
causal access to properties counts as acquaintance with the quiddity.
When you know all of science but don’t know what it is like to see
red, then you can name the relevant property and perhaps interact
it from the outside, but you lack the mode of presentation that
reveals what the quiddity of the property is. What Mary lacked was
knowledge by acquaintance.
One can fairly resist the claim that there is a deep sense in which
introspection affords a uniquely revelatory mode of presentation.53
To reinforce the position of the physicalist, we should recall that if
the world is merely physical, then the introspective relation cannot
itself be a primitive and irreducible relation that is superadded to

the physical world but must itself be some sort of causal/functional
relation to a property. Call that causal/functional relation the intro-
spective mode of presentation. Now the physicalist will allow that
when one knows all of color science, one may still lack the intro-
spective mode of presentation of the property of seeing redly. One
will enjoy other modes of repesentation of that property, but not
the introspective one. If one likes one can call the introspective
mode ‘aquaintance’ and say that when you know color science you
are nevertheless not, ipso facto, acquainted with the property. But
there is no magic in a word. Why say that physics only detects the
role of a property but introspection can detect the property itself?
Introspection depends on role just as much as physics. Remove the
causal/functional role of the property and there is neither effective
introspection of a property by an organism nor effective detection
of that property from the outside. Meanwhile, it is true of both
introspection and measurement that even if they actually detect one
property, a different property might have been detected by the same
introspective/measuring process. The sense in which mass detectors
are insensitive to quiddities is exactly the sense in which introspec-
tion is insensitive to quiddities. (Semantic tricks won’t help here. If
you like, make it part of the meaning of ‘introspection’ that it involve
causal relation to the actual properties which play sensation-roles.
We can, similarly, make it part of the meaning of ‘mass detection’
that it involve a causal relation to the actual property that constitutes
mass. We have parity.) Note further that there seems to be no a
priori guarantee that what we call introspection of pain is causally
sensitive to only one quiddity. It is perfectly conceivable that any of
three quiddities is good enough to activate the “pain detector”. To
suppose that we know a priori that phenomenal categories stand in
a one-one relation to quiddities is surely asking far too much of our
ordinary phenomenal concepts.
Summing up: Scientists name quiddities. Introspection photo-
graphs them. This is the picture that the regular physicalist must
resist. Suppose, then, there are quiddities, properties that are indefin-
able by their causal role. Are they hidden to us, qua scientists?
Well, qua scientists, we can do all of the following: We can refer to
them. We can describe their actual roles. We can rigidly designate
46 JOHN HAWTHORNE
them. We can have machines that detect them. We can describe their
possible roles. What more do you want?
CONCLUSION
I am no physicalist. I would therefore welcome a successful philo-

sophical challenge to physicalism. As things stand, however, the
strategies just outlined seem adequate to counter the best anti-
physicalist arguments that are available.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to David Chalmers for extensive conversations and

comments and to Steffen Borge, Mark Scala, Zoltan Gendler Szabo
and especially to Tamar Szabo Gendler and Ted Sider for comments
on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to Brian McLaughlin, Brian
Loar and an audience at the 1999 conference at the University of
Buffalo on David Chalmers’ work (where portions of this paper
were presented) for helpful discussion. Work on this paper was initi-
ated by some email exchanges with Chalmers concerning a draft of
The Conscious Mind and has continued sporadically since. As many
readers will be aware, a wealth of critical material on The Conscious
Mind has been written, including such important pieces as Katalin
Balog’s ‘Conceivability, Possibility and the Mind-Body Problem’
(The Philosophical Review, October 1999). Ned Block and Robert
Stalnaker’s ‘Conceptual Analysis, Dualism and the Explanatory
Gap’ (The Philosophical Review, January 1999) to name but a few,
(with many more pieces in prospect by the time this paper appears
in print). Rather than overhaul this paper to take account of the
burgeoning literature, let me readily acknowledge that its contents
overlap in important ways with recent critical material.
NOTES
1 What counts as a physical science? Perhaps an ideal physics will use spooks
to collapse wave functions. But as the term ‘physicalism’ is currently used, that
would mean that physicalism is false. So ‘physical’ doesn’t really mean ‘belong-
ing to ideal physics’ after all. I shall not worry about this complaint here.
2 This argument is developed in Chapter Four of The Conscious Mind: In Search
of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press, 1996).

3 See The Conscious Mind, pp. 135–136.
4 Though not of course in any success sense of ‘conceive’ where ‘conceiving that
P’ is being used in a way such that it analytically entails some cognitive relation
to a possible world where P.
5 See, notably, lecture three of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1980) and Frank Jackson’s ‘Armchair Metaphysics’, in O’Leary-

Hawthorne and Michael (eds.), Philosophy in Mind (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994)
whose themes are taken up further in From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of
Conceptual Analysis (Clarendon: Oxford, 1998).
6 Chalmers has work in progress that examines the various concepts of con-
ceivability at some length.

7 The definitions are only as clear as ‘fully grasps’ and ‘have an intuition’ are
clear. Naturally, I worry about skeptical concerns tied to the unclarity of such
notions.
8 See pp. 139ff. The reader should be alerted to possible terminological confu-
sions. Chalmers often uses ‘conceivability’ in a success sense according to which

it does entail possibility and something like ‘prima facie conceivability’ for the
weaker sense of ‘conceivable’ according to which it doesn’t entail possibility.
Even in the weaker sense, not every physicalist I know concedes that zombies are
positively conceivable. I shall not be exploring the prospects for hanging tough
on that point in this paper.
9 Those who do not like to have substances like water, carbon and so forth in
their ontology (allowing only this or that quantity of water, carbon and so on)
will object to this way of presenting the matter. They may wish to construe the
identity between water and H2 O as property identity: what we have is one prop-
erty, ascribable to certain quantities, which is expressed both by ‘is water’ and
‘is H2 O’. Such fine points of ontology are not, however, important to the current
topic.
10 Throughout I use ‘it is possible that’ to mean what Chalmers calls ‘2-
possibility’, where secondary intension and not primary intension is the test of
possibility. This is the more standard more of ‘It is metaphysically possible that’.
11 The idea of a “that’s all” fact is to found, inter alia, in Frank Jackson’s
‘Armchair Metaphysics’, op. cit.

12 I admit that it is something of a concession to the anti-physicalist that I admit
even the cogency of this conception of acquaintance. I shall not dwell on the
propriety of such a concession here.
13 My generation of a concept has been to some degree incomplete. I have
provided various sufficient conditions, but some questions have been left
unanswered. For example: if the world is merely physical and there is some state
that plays most but not all of the pain role, will that be good enough to count as
48 JOHN HAWTHORNE
pain*? For my dialectical purposes here, it does not matter that I be more precise
on such matters.
14 With orthodoxy I am assuming throughout the following discussion that
coextensionality across nomologically possible worlds is insufficient for property

identity. If that assumption is wrong then much of contemporary philosophy of
mind needs rethinking.
15 For a notable predecessor, see Davies and Humberstone’s ‘Two Notions of
Necessity’, Philosophical Studies 38 (1980), 1–30.

16 In assuming the zombie* will designate a physical state type by his usage
of ‘pain*’, I am neither relying on a general principle of charity nor on some

crude causal theory of reference: I am instead relying on the primary intension
of ‘pain*’ described in preceding section. (I am thus immune from Chalmers’
complaint against Shoemaker in ‘Materialism and the Metaphysics of Modality’,
forthcoming, PPR, p. 16 in draft.)
17 Nothing that I have said suggests that an ideal agent, fully informed about
the actual world will make mistakes about what is possible. If informed that the
actual world is merely physical, an ideal agent will no longer reckon zombie*s
conceivable. Ideal conceivability can still, for all I have said, march in step with
possibility. Whether it does so or not is not a matter upon which I care to adju-
dicate here.
18 As Ted Sider pointed out to me, there are some conceptions of “physicalism”
according to which, on the view I have sketched, physicalism about pain* is

wrong. If physicalism about pain* is the view that it is not even primary possible
that pain* is not physical (i.e. there is no world considered as actual such that,
considered as actual, ‘pain*’ is true of only non-physical states), then physicalism
about pain* is wrong. And if physicalism about pain* is the view that it is not
primary possible that some being has all my physical states but none of whose
physical states count as pain* (i.e. there is no world considered as actual where a
being containing all my physical states is such that, considered as actual, ‘pain*’
fails to be true of one of those physical states), then physicalism about pain*
is wrong. But these are conceptions of physicalism that should not be part of a
physicalist metaphysic. After all, it is consistent with the denial of physicalism in
this sense that all the properties attaching to things are those expressed by an ideal
physics.
19 I don’t mean that you will replace the old concept by a new concept which is
true of us. I mean that you will think that ‘pain’ in the mouths of our earlier selves
was true of us.
20 One might press further: why is the concept of pain such that we would react
this way to the oracle? I think this is because our epistemic commitments in regard
to our concept of pain – what philosophers call privileged access – trump any
metaphysical picture that we might be inclined to associated with the term ‘pain’.
It is, however, beyond the scope of this paper to explore this question further,
requiring as it does some more systematic reflection on how primary intensions
get fixed this way rather than that.
21 Thanks to David Chalmers here.
22 Suppose the objector tried to hold his grounds as follows: “I agree that it is a
priori that if the world is merely physical, then the predicate ‘pain’ would express
a physical property. But I do not reckon it strictly a priori that
Someone is in pain if the predicate ‘pain’ as used by us is true of them.
So it is not strictly a priori that if the world is merely physical then there are
pains.”
This does not strike me as very promising. Lacking the space to explore the
relevant issues in full, we can note: (a) Whether or not it is strictly a priori, all
parties will agree that it is obviously true that there are pains if ‘is a pain’, as used
by us, is true of certain events. (b) The stipulations that I made for the predicate
‘pain*’ seem to hold of ‘pain’ in our mouths. Grant that it is a priori that if the
actual world is merely physical, ‘is a pain’ is true of certain events, and we will
now all at least agree that it is true that if the actual world is merely physical, then
there are pains.
23 See The Conscious Mind, p. 204, responding to some informal communication
between us.
24 Chalmers will of course maintain that it is a priori that if the actual world is
merely physical, there are no pains, presumably putting this in the category of
relatively unobvious a priori truths, citing the positive conceivability of zombies
as evidence. It strikes me as a more plausible gloss on our conceptual scheme
to insist that the epistemic status of zombie intuitions gets knocked out upon the
supposition that the actual world is merely physical.
25 The Conscious Mind, p. 59.
26 A residual worry: “But you are still saying that the concept of pain is
disjunctive and you can’t be right.” Answer: When one reflects on the primary
intension of any naturalkindish or explanatorily central concept, one will want
to assert a whole variety of indicative conditionals that capture what the concept
will be true of if such and such a state of affairs turned out to be actual. When
one uses descriptions to capture that primary intension, the full specification of
the primary intension will inevitably look disjunctive in character. That doesn’t
mean the original term picks out something that is ‘gerrymandered’ – since for
all that it may rigidly designate a joint in the world. Nor does it mean the term
was introduced via a canonical definition that stipulated it to be synonymous with
some disjunction.
27 See ‘Dthat’, in Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics (New York: Academic Press,
1979).
28 Granted, it doesn’t “feel” like our concept of pain is vague. Insofar as the
physicalist worldview puts pressure on us to admit that the concept of pain

may have multiple precisifications, that will come as something of a shock.
It feels like, for competing transworld extensions, there must be a fact of the
matter as to which things really have pain. Yet, absent a general commitment to
epistemicism about vagueness, it is very hard to see how the physicalist can avoid
conceding vagueness concerning the extension of ‘is in pain’. I very much doubt
50 JOHN HAWTHORNE
whether this “argument from bivalence” can be effectively developed in support

of anti-physicalism, but I shall not dicuss the issue further here.
29 See The Conscious Mind, pp. 60–61 (with some unimportant terminological
variation).
30 29 In Themes From Kaplan, Almog Perry and Wettstein, eds. (Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1989), pp. 481–563.

31 Its not even clear that claims of that form unambiguously require the concept
of pain of the subject. Consider the use of ‘Jones believes that the person shaking
your hand is a spy’ which does not require that Jones conceives of the relevant
person under the description ‘person skaking your hand’. The later expression is
merely used to identify the object of the knowledge – without requiring that the
object is conceived of via the sense associated with that expression. Similarly,
perhaps, we can judge that a creature knows that pain feels thus in a way such that
‘pain’ plays a role analogous to ‘person shaking your hand’. (Thanks to Steffen
Borge here.)
32 How does the worldbook associate a demonstatum with each demonstative?.
If the worldbook merely says “The demonstatum is dthat demonstratum of the

utterance by s at t” that in a sense provides a demonstatum (by picking it out), but
does not pick it out in a way that would be of any epistemic use. I am of course
assuming that the worldbook picks it out via some sort of coordinate system.
(Thanks to Ted Sider here).
33 Of course it may well be that while the thought ‘That is a ghost’ encodes an
error, our thought ‘Thus is what its like to feel pain’, may encode no error. The
point of the analogy is that in both cases, there is a kind of ignorance about the
demonstratum.
34 Mary is the science expert lacking in color perception described by Frank
Jackson’s ‘Epiphenomal Qualia’, Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982), 127–136.

35 I am particularly grateful to discussions with David Chalmers here.
36 In ‘Knowing How’ (Journal of Philosophy, August 2001), Jason Stanley and
Timothy Williamson argue that all knowing-how is constituted by some sort of

knowing-that, where the knowing-that has something like the form ‘Thus is a way
of F-ing’, where the demonstative refers with a “practical mode of presentation”.
I do not need to rely on that thesis here. I merely wish to rely on the fact that
we do sometimes truly make judgments of ‘Thus is a way of F-ing’ where the
way of F-ing is demonstrated from the inside, as it were, by a practical mode of
demonstration.
37 Of course there may be vagueness. If we are supervaluationist and not
epistemicist, we can anticipate that the centred plus worldbook will provide a
range of acceptable precisifications for vague demonstratives.
38 Cf. n. 36.
39 See The Conscious Mind, Chapter 7.
40 One might of course insist that it picks out a disjunction of qualities in such
a case. But this is not particularly plausible. If the person in front of me is being
replaced by a duplicate at every instant, then it is far better to say that ‘That man is
there’ (supposing the formation of that judgment takes time) is guilty of reference
failure than to give a disjunctive treatment of the judgment. Why treat the qualia
dance any differently?
41 We shouldn’t make a big fuss about vagueness, since there are surely even
more pressing concerns about vagueness when it comes to experiential ‘thus’s’.

How much of the qualitative theatre is embraced by ‘Thus is what winning feels
like’?
42 Chalmers, pp. 135–136. As Chalmers is fully aware, this sort of view was
explored by Bertrand Russell in The Analysis of Matter (London: Kegan Paul),

1927.
43 Of course it will be a complex property rather than a simple property. If there
are quiddities, then properties that figure at the level of, say, neurology rather
than fundamental physics will involve a complex of quiddities. I shall ignore this
complication in what follows. I note in passing though that it adds additional
problems to the claim that introspection is revelatory of quidditative nature, since
it does not seem that introspection locks us onto the structural complexity of, say,
pain. (Thanks to Brian Loar here.)
44 Note, though, that on this gloss, it is not straightforwardly true that physical
duplicates of ourselves that lack experiences are possible.

45 I think that this argument, which notably doesn’t trade on zombie intuitions,
is nevertheless very important to Chalmers’ own thinking, but I shall not try to
make good on that exegetical claim here.
46 For discussion sympathetic to anti-quidditism, see Sydney Shoemaker’s
‘Causality and Properties’, in Identity, Cause and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1984), pp. 206–233. See also my ‘Causal Structuralism’ (forth-
coming, Philosophical Perspectives).
47 Cf. David Lewis, The Plurality of Worlds, p. 220ff.
48 To make this vivid, suppose that science allowed electrons to coincide and that
trajectories were governed by probabilistic laws. If electrons A and B coincided

for the first part of their history and then diverged along paths 1 and 2 respectively,
the laws will militate in favor of the possibility that B took path 1, A path 2.
49 John Boler, ‘Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition’, in Norman Kretzman,
Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval
Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 464.
50 Of course, it remains true that some modes of presentation are more useful
for certain informational purposes than others – ‘Dthat answer to the question
“What’s the smallest prime between 10 and 20” ’and ‘11’ rigidly designate the
same thing, but play very different roles in information processing.
51 Note that the ordinary language distinction between those descriptions/predi-
cates that tell you what a thing is and those that do not will be of limited use
to Chalmers here. After all ‘water’ does serve as an answer to ‘What is in the
glass?’ and ‘John’s favorite drink’ does not (except as a joke), even if both answers
corefer: Yet the former hardly serves to provide us with the metaphysical low-
down on the stuff.
52 Note that just as haecceitism, as I glossed it, doesn’t require belief in this-
nesses, so quidditism needn’t require belief in a second-order property that

52 JOHN HAWTHORNE
constitutes the suchness or quiddity of a first order property. What is crucial to

the idea that the being of a property transcends its role is rather the idea that
sameness in role needn’t entail property identity. I explore these issues in much
more detail in ‘Causal Structuralism’.
53 The idea, is, admittedly, very natural. In ‘Should a Materialist Believe in
Qualia?’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995), 140–144, David Lewis

suggests that folk psychology presupposes that introspection is revelatory, and
that this part of folk psychology should be rejected. Better to say that this part of
folk psychology is wrong about pains that to insist on the non-negotiable status
of such conditionals as: ‘If there are pains, then we know them in a specially
revelatory way’. Adapting this insight to Chalmers’ framework: The primary
intension associated with ‘pain’ allows that if the actual world is not so obliging as
to provide us with revelatory insight, ‘pain’ is still true of some states. (Analogy:
Folk physics might tell us that there is very little empty space within a solid object.
But that doesn’t mean that ‘solid’ isn’t true of anything. It means that one strand
of folk physics is messed up.)
Rutgers, The State University

Douglas Campus NJ 08901-2882
New Brunswick, USA
E-mail: jphawtho@rci.rutgers.edu

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JOHN HAWTHORNE

ADVICE FOR PHYSICALISTS

(Received 29 October 2001)

ABSTRACT. This paper engages with two compelling challenges to physicalism,

Philosophical Studies 108: 17–52, 2002.

ment. Both strategies share a common thread: they try to assimilate

1. PART ONE: THE ZOMBIE ARGUMENT

‘Water is not H2 O’, where ‘water’ is accompanied with the same

The trick is to find a way of conceding this point without thereby

1.2. Totality-Dependent Concepts

With this stipulation in place, we can confidently assert the

1.2.3. Pain*, Primary and Secondary Intension

To illustrate: Suppose a name ‘Goliath’ has its reference fixed by

secondary intension treats each merely possible world as non-actual

1.2.4. Pain* and Zombies

IC1 appears very plausible. In particular, Chalmers could hardly

that is something over and above any property given by a functional

inconsistent. Views which offer a straightforward functional defini-

Obviously, ‘pain’ was never explicitly introduced via a complex

of pain did I invoke possession conditions of this sort. Isn’t that a

1.2.5. Objection: That’s The Wrong Sort of Physicalism

As far as my dialectic with Chalmers goes, these concerns are not

1.3. Demonstrative Concepts

conceived of situations that are compatible with the Physical World-

without the referent of ‘thus’ existing”. That is no more compelling

1.3.2. The Criticism From Epistemic Progress35

Mary be assimilated to the semantic features of indexicals? Let me

1.3.3. Are Experiential Demonstratives Special?

worldbook, whereas in every case where it is clear that a physical

2. PART TWO: THE QUIDDITY ARGUMENT

So Chalmers will, after all, allow ‘pain’ to rigidly designate an

introspection reveals what an experiential property is in itself? Given

2.2. Are Experiential Properties Role-Transcendent?

to the thesis that pain cannot be defined by the role assigned to it

2.3. Quiddities, Science and Introspection

science could even afford a basis for believing in role switching

equally good ways of designating them.50 We can call the modes by

itself be a primitive and irreducible relation that is superadded to

I am no physicalist. I would therefore welcome a successful philo-

I am grateful to David Chalmers for extensive conversations and

of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press, 1996).

Blackwell, 1980) and Frank Jackson’s ‘Armchair Metaphysics’, in O’Leary-

ceivability at some length.

sions. Chalmers often uses ‘conceivability’ in a success sense according to which

‘Armchair Metaphysics’, op. cit.

coextensionality across nomologically possible worlds is insufficient for property

Necessity’, Philosophical Studies 38 (1980), 1–30.

of ‘pain*’, I am neither relying on a general principle of charity nor on some

according to which, on the view I have sketched, physicalism about pain* is

Someone is in pain if the predicate ‘pain’ as used by us is true of them.

physicalist worldview puts pressure on us to admit that the concept of pain

whether this “argument from bivalence” can be effectively developed in support

sity Press, 1989), pp. 481–563.

If the worldbook merely says “The demonstatum is dthat demonstratum of the

Jackson’s ‘Epiphenomal Qualia’, Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982), 127–136.

Timothy Williamson argue that all knowing-how is constituted by some sort of

more pressing concerns about vagueness when it comes to experiential ‘thus’s’.

explored by Bertrand Russell in The Analysis of Matter (London: Kegan Paul),

duplicates of ourselves that lack experiences are possible.

‘Causality and Properties’, in Identity, Cause and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge

trajectories were governed by probabilistic laws. If electrons A and B coincided

nesses, so quidditism needn’t require belief in a second-order property that

constitutes the suchness or quiddity of a first order property. What is crucial to