Rogerio Gerspacher

The author briefly discusses the importance of the explanatory gap in philosophy of mind. He claims that, if science cannot explain the existence of other people’s subjective experiences, at least what cannot be described is something that cannot be observed. On the other hand, if non-reductionist physicalists, who defend the causal efficacy of the mental are right, it would not be possible to explain the human behaviour only by physical laws, because human behaviour could be described as series of events in physical space, science would not be able to explain physical events describable in third person perspective, and therefore the second explanatory gap would be the most harmful to physicalism. The author briefly comments that these conclusions are compatible with Jaegwon Kim’s defence of epiphenomenalism, but disagrees with this author when he affirms that the importance of the mental could be minimized.

It is easy to accept that scientific reasoning cannot determine the characteristics of subjective experiences in cases like Broad’s archangel or Jackson’s Mary. The author questions why this seems to be evident and discusses the differences between these cases and ordinary scientific work, where future states of studied systems can be predicted in phenomenal terms. He concludes that important limitations of scientific reasoning are due to the inadequacy of human sensorial apparatus for representing physical reality. Such inadequacies were more evident in Mary’s case, but are always present, and entail the existence of the explanatory gap.