Colour and qualia

7. Eliminativism

We have seen that functional/relational analyses of colour qualia face serious difficulties. We have also seen that treating colour qualia as intrinsic properties also encounters a serious obstacle, in the form of the explanatory gap. Of course there are possible replies to these difficulties, and many contemporary philosophers hold one or the other of these views. Yet, the persistence of objections to the various accounts of qualia has led some philosophers to embrace eliminativism about subjective colour (whether or not they, like Hardin, are eliminativists about the objective sort). That is, they see the philosophical problem of qualia as our attempting to identify a real phenomenon in the world which corresponds to a conception to which no real phenomenon does, nor even could, correspond. Belief in qualia is something like belief in ghosts. Just as we do not bother to find some real phenomenon to serve as the referent of our idea of a ghost, so too we should abandon the idea that a real phenomenon could serve as the referent of our idea of subjective red (see Eliminativism).

Eliminativism is quite naturally joined to the representational position just described. No one literally denies that we experience sensations of colour. That the fire engine looks red to me is a genuine fact. However, the eliminativist teases apart what is genuine about this fact from what is illusory in the following manner. That I see, and therefore judge, the fire engine to be a certain way, is undeniable. But it is wrong to infer from my perceptual judgment concerning the surface of the fire engine to the existence of a colour-like property of my experience itself – a colour quale. It is the existence of this inner property – around which inversion and absence puzzles take hold – that the eliminativist denies.

A major source for eliminativist sentiment is Wittgenstein’s famous attack on the coherence of any notion of inner experience that did not manifest itself in outwardly observable behaviour (see Criteria; Private language argument). While Wittgenstein had many targets in mind with his ‘private language argument’ – his argument against the possibility of a language that only one person could possibly understand – certainly the idea that I could introspect and discover qualia as properties of my inner experiences was one of them. A number of philosophers have extended this Wittgensteinian critique, most notably Daniel Dennett (1991). As Dennett characterizes them, believers in qualia are tied to a picture of the mind as a theatre (the ‘Cartesian theatre’), in which mental entities are on display before the mind’s eye. He has coined the term ‘figment’ to capture the unjustified inference from the reality of colours as properties of physical objects to the reality of colour qualia as properties of internal states.

Suggestive as this diagnosis of the problem of colour qualia is, it alone does not really constitute an argument in favour of eliminativism. However, various further arguments have been presented in the recent literature. First, the believer in qualia is accused of allegiance to a dualist metaphysics. Second, qualia are disparaged as posits of common-sense psychology, a theory that, like many common-sense theories of the world, must give way before its more rigorous and detailed scientific competitors. Third, thought experiments like the inverted and absent qualia hypotheses are attacked as internally incoherent. Finally, belief in qualia is alleged to lead to unsavoury sceptical consequences. For instance, if someone could be functionally identical to me without having qualia, how do I know I really have them? (Of course some of these same arguments could serve to support a reduction of qualia to functional states, rather than their elimination. The line between eliminativism and reductionism, either of the functional or neurophysiological variety, is not always easy to draw.)

Advocates of colour qualia have responded to these arguments. Those who do not straightforwardly embrace dualism deny that their position entails it. Qualia, on their view, are not posits of an outmoded theory, but among the primary data that any adequate psychological theory must explain. The discussion above demonstrates how hard it is really to undermine the inverted qualia hypothesis. As for the charge of scepticism, many dismiss it as just that. Sceptical worries attach to most phenomena, they argue. But whether or not these replies succeed, eliminativist challenges of the sort just described will find adherents so long as a truly explanatory connection between qualitative character and neurophysiological or functional organization is still lacking.