Joseph Levine

In this chapter I survey the various roles that acquaintance might play in the philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, and I then go on to explore the prospects for a naturalistic account of acquaintance to fill these roles. I will continue by arguing that while some roles can be filled by a naturalistic theory, others cannot. Finally, I will briefly present a non-naturalistic theory, according to which consciousness just is the relation of acquaintance, and show both how it accomplishes what a naturalistic theory could not but also how it cannot accomplish everything a naturalistic theory can.

This chapter raises a problem for the phenomenal concept strategy. The problem is framed partly in terms of the explanatory gap, which is roughly the claim that the existence or nature of phenomenal consciousness cannot be completely explained in physical terms. As applied to the explanatory gap, the phenomenal concept strategy requires a physicalist account of phenomenal concepts on which the gap derives from phenomenal concepts rather than phenomenal consciousness itself. It is argued that to pass muster, such accounts must satisfy the following constraint: that no appeal be made in the explanation to any mental property or relation that is basic. An account violates this constraint if, for example, it makes appeal to an unexplained notion of acquaintance between a subject and her brain states. It is not understood how any physicalist account can both meet this constraint and explain how the explanatory gap derives from the peculiar features of phenomenal concepts. Although some physicalist account might achieve these goals, it is suggested that physicalism may be false not because phenomenal properties themselves are not physical but rather because somehow we embody a relation to them that is itself brute and irreducible to physical relations.

Consciousness presents a problem. There are excellent reasons for believing that materialism, or physicalism, is the correct metaphysical view of our world, yet it is extremely difficult to see how conscious experiences, or qualia, can be incorporated into the materialist framework. Both aspects of the problem are defended. First, a positive argument for materialism is given, with responses to dualist objections. Second, objections are presented to most materialist attempts to explain consciousness – in particular, higher‐order theories, representationalism, and eliminativism. Finally, it is argued that to make genuine progress on this problem we need to delve deeper into the question of our cognitive access to our own experience. Thus the problems of intentionality and consciousness are not as separable as has often been thought.