Keith Frankish

This paper asks whether we can identify a neutral explanandum for theories of phenomenal consciousness, acceptable to all sides. The ‘classic’ conception of qualia, on which qualia are intrinsic, ineffable, and subjective, will not serve this purpose, but it is widely assumed that a watered-down ‘diet’ conception will. I argue that this is wrong and that the diet notion of qualia has no distinctive content. There is no phenomenal residue left when qualia are stripped of their intrinsicality, ineffability, and subjectivity. Thus, if we reject classic qualia realism, we should accept that all that needs explaining are ‘zero’ qualia – our dispositions to judge that our experiences have classic qualia. Diet qualia should, in Dennett’s phrase, be quined

It is sometimes suggested that we can think “in” natural language. According to this “cognitive” conception of language, we have a linguistic mind, or level of mentality, which operates by manipulating representations of natural language sentences. This paper outlines two evolutionary questions that the cognitive conception must address and looks at some versions of it to see which provides the best answers to them. The most plausible version, I argue, is the view that the linguistic mind is a virtual system, which arose when early humans learned to engage in private speech and to regulate it using metacognitive skills originally developed for use in public argumentation