Bruno Mölder

An explanatory gap ensues when the truths constituting the explanans do not entail the explanandum. Attempts to give a physicalist account of consciousness seem to generate an explanatory gap, which is special in the following psychological sense. In other cases, it is possible to bridge or close the gap by regimenting or eliminating the respective concepts. In the case of consciousness, however, there is a pervasive intuition that the gap remains even when one works out a notion of consciousness that allows the entailment of truths about consciousness from physical premises. The intuition is expressed by the sense that something essential about consciousness is left out from any such conceptual regimentation. This paper defends the view that this intuition is generated by the way our experiences are given to us. Every experience has a component that is not captured by any specification. The gap intuition is due to this ineffable component in experiences. Since conscious experiences are partly ineffable, it seems that no account of consciousness captures conscious experiences entirely and so would develop the intuition that something has been left out. An alternative explanation to the gap intuition is provided by the “phenomenal concepts’ strategy”. According to this strategy, it is the peculiar nature of phenomenal concepts that feeds the intuition. The main problem with such an approach is that phenomenal concepts are more coarse-grained than the experiences themselves and thus their application still does not entail what it is like to have a particular phenomenal experience.

This book provides a thoroughly worked out and systematic presentation of an interpretivist position in the philosophy of mind, of the view that having mental properties is a matter of interpretation. Bruno Mölder elaborates and defends a particular version of interpretivism, the ascription theory, which explicates the possession of mental states with contents in terms of their canonical ascribability, and shows how it can withstand various philosophical challenges. Apart from a defence of the ascription theory from the objections commonly directed against interpretivism, the book provides a critical analysis of major alternative accounts of mental state possession as well as the interpretivist ideas originating from Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. The viability of the approach is demonstrated by showing how one can treat mental causation as well as the faculties closely connected with consciousness -- perception and the awareness of one’s own mental states -- in the interpretivist framework