Consciousness and the Limits of Objectivity: The Case for Subjective Physicalism

by Robert J Howell

In Consciousness and the Limits of Objectivity Robert J. Howell argues that the options in the debates about consciousness and the mind-body problem are more limited than many philosophers have appreciated. Unless one takes a hard-line stance, which either denies the data provided by consciousness or makes a leap of faith about future discoveries, one must admit that no objective picture of our world can be complete. Howell argues, however, that this is consistent with physicalism, contrary to received wisdom. After developing a novel, neo-Cartesian notion of the physical, followed by a careful consideration of the three major anti-materialist arguments--Black's 'Presentation Problem', Jackson's Knowledge Argument, and Chalmers' Conceivability Argument--Howell proposes a 'subjective physicalism' which gives the data of consciousness their due, while retaining the advantages of a monistic, physical ontology.

Genres: Philosophy

202 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Mark Moon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subjective physicalism is an interesting view in philosophy of mind, and this is a good defense of it. The view is like this: everything is (or supervenes on) the physical, so that we can retain a physicalist metaphysics, but some aspects of physical states can only be fully grasped (whatever that means) by instantiating those states; this makes the explanatory mind-body gap epistemic rather than metaphysical. This is rather close to some forms of panpsychism, but Howell considers panpsychist views to be non-physicalist. The issue of causal exclusion is dealt with very concisely, by saying that causal inference cannot distinguish between necessarily co-instantiated properties, and I think this is generally the right tack. The book is well-organized and fairly well-written, though the editor missed a few minor issues (e.g. Andrew Wiles's last name being rendered as "Wile", twice).