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PHENOMENAL CONCEPTS 239
is not essentially related to the qualitative experiences of our inner life. It seems clear that
outside the philosophy seminar we would agree that the sky is blue and that granny smith
apples are green, regardless of our inner qualitative experiences. Even border-line cases
satisfy this intuition. A subject suffering from color blindness, for example, would not say that
the green things are rather and in reality yellow, but he will rather admit that he experiences
them as yellow but they are really green. In this case the person has troubles applying the
right concept. Notice furthermore that qualitative experiences are not necessary for deploying
language of feelings and perception; Philosophical Zombies for example, are completely
capable of deploying correctly colour words and identifying when someone is very likely in
pain. The case of the inverted spectrum also confirms this line of thought, for even if our
inner qualitative experiences were different, the meaning of the words we use to talk about
colors would stay the same and would apply to the same objects. 8
The above confirms what we said before about public language. As we said before, we can
learn that the meaning of the word ’red’ applies to red things disregarding our qualitative
experience. Depending on our preferred semantic theory we can say that the meaning of the
predicate red is the set of objects that we call red, disregarding how they appear to us or that
the meaning is determined by the usage of the predicate in a linguistic community, also
independently from private qualitative experiences. To stress the point I have been making,
let me quote a famous passage of Wittgenstein:
Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself "How blue the sky is!"–When you do it
spontaneously–without philosophical intentions–the idea never crosses your mind that
this impression of colour belongs only to you. And you have no hesitation in exclaiming
that to someone else. And if you point at anything as you say the words you point at the
sky. I am saying: you have not the feeling of pointing-into-yourself, which often
accompanies ’naming the sensation’ when one is thinking about ’private language’. Nor
do you think that really you ought not to point to the colour with your hand, but with
your attention. Wittgenstein (1973, §275)
When we speak we do not detach the color-impression from the object. Only in very special
scenarios, for example in Mary’s release or in philosophy conferences we are tempted to think
that we use one word to mean at one time the color known to everyone–and another word for
the ’visual impression’ which we get while staring at colorful things. And this suggests that the
meaning of the word ’red’ is public and partially independent of qualitative experiences. It
also concedes that we have the ability to refer to the private qualitative experiences; the point
is that that is not normally how we use color words. In fact, the concepts we use to refer to our
qualitative experiences are PC and even if sometime people misuse the public color words to
refer to inner experiences, we should distinguish both concepts.
But what then is special about phenomenal concept? Which concepts refer not to the things
outside to us but to the qualitative experiences of our inner life and necessitate, in order to be
deployed, that we undergo a certain experience, i.e. what is a true PC? I will argue that the
special way in which PC refer to phenomenal experiences is through demonstratives. E.g.
“That is what is like to see red”. We could also introduce a new term Red phen to refer to them.
However, I will claim that although both concepts have the same extension, they have
different senses. As we will see, this fact seems to be ignored very often.
8
J. Cohen (in conversation) pointed out, that this consequence is compatible with two possibilities: i.)
Meanings are understandable independently of qualitative experiences, ii.) meanings are rather closely
tied to qualitative experiences but the qualitative experiences are equal across the population. It seems
to me, that i.) is the most plausible alternative. I showed that even subjects with varying qualitative
experiences like Zombies and people with Color Blindness are fully capable of understanding and using
words like red and pain. Besides, the best explanation for the fact that qualitative experiences don’t vary
across the population in a significant matter is best explain through the physical similarly of human
kind.