I was reading some of the literature on qualia recently, and I was struck by the use of the term qualia freak. Qualia Freak is a label for someone who endorses the view that phenomenal experiences cannot be individuated by what they represent. Qualia freaks believe that experiences must be individuated by some intrinsic feature of that experience.
That’s a pretty funny label, but it’s also pretty clearly an attempt to poke fun at or tease proponents of such a view. So I’m trying to come up with labels for theories in philosophy that are abusive. Perhaps the term abusive is a bit harsh, but you get the idea. Perhaps we should call these labels teasing labels. Basically, I’m looking for labels that seem like they are introduced with a partial intention to tease proponents of the view.
Here are some that I can come up with.
Dogmatist
Someone who endorses a Chisholmian-esque epistemic principle like “If it appears to S that P (and S has no defeaters), then S is justified in believing P”
Ostrich Nominalism
A version of nominalism about properties that doesn’t address questions that many think motivate postulating the existence of abstract universals (e.g. questions about what grounds similarity relations)
Magical Realism
This is a realist view about possible worlds that denies that possible worlds are ersatz linguistic entities and denies that they are concrete worlds like our own.
Qualia Freaks
People who think that phenomenal experiences are individuated by some intrinsic feature of the experience.
Non-serious Presentism
Non-serious presentists defend against the cross-temporal relations objection to presentism by holding that you can stand in relations to things that don’t exist.
I have some thoughts about what unifies this phenomenon in contemporary philosophy, but before I go into details – I’m curious about how wide spread this is.
It’s time for a bleg: Can you add to this list? Can you come up with more popular, well-known labels for philosophical theories that seem to be introduced with a (perhaps very small) intent to mock or tease.
Peter van Inwagen has a paper (I forget the title – it appeared in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, I believe) defending ‘magical realism’ in which he discusses the ‘abusive’ nature of Lewis’s label (if I remember right, he actually says “I don’t have to take this abuse”). Van Inwagen responds humorously by insisting that his view be referred to as UNSOUND modal realism, where UNSOUND is some ridiculous acronym I can’t remember.
Anyway, the exchange was more amusing than substantive, but it brings out the phenomenon you are talking about.
Well, I think Pryor, who defends dogmatism about perception, is the one who started using “dogmatism” in that way. So it isn’t abusive in exactly the same way as Magical Realism.
Not quite on the topic of your post, but I’m inclined to think that qualia freakism is almost certainly true given a natural thing to say about seemings/intuitions. If intuitions or seemings that P can come in various strengths, as seems overwhelmingly plausible, then Qualia Freakism is true. This is because two seemings have the same content, P, but one is stronger than the other, i.e. one has a different phenomenal character. There are ways to avoid this result and still deny Freakism, but, to me anyway, they don’t seem very natural or intuitive.
Kenny,
That’s great…I’ll be tracking that down immediately.
Chris,
I vaguely remember a paper written by the McGrew’s in which they use the phrase “çhisholmian dogmatism” and a paper by Audi with “epistemological dogmatism” in the title. I’ll look into those and get back to you.
Regarding the actual truth of qualia freakism…I guess it depends on how strong the individuation claim is…
Strong Freakism = Qualia can *only* be individuated by intrinsic features
Weak Freakism = Qualia can *sometimes* be individuated by intrinsic features
Your considerations motivate WF, but not SF, right?
Now that I am home and have my books –
I first learned of the van Inwagen paper from the footnote on p. 182 of On the Plurality of Worlds. It reads:
(Added in proof): True when written; but Peter van Inwagen’s ‘Two Concepts of Possible Worlds’, soon to appear in Mid-West Studies in Philosophy 11, will be an explicit and formidable defense of magical ersatzism.
If I remember correctly, I had some trouble tracking down the book because the citation wasn’t quite right.
Some guy: In this paper, I’ll be defending an internalist view…
Me: Wait, isn’t there another word for that? You know, something less offensive…
Some guy: “Internalist” isn’t a dirty word, it’s fine.
Me: Well, it certainly carries with it some implications. Unmotivated, for example.
1. Not exactly the sort of thing you were looking for, but in his “Reasonable Religious Disagreements,” Feldman calls a view “mindless relativism”. The view is sadly somewhat popular amongst undergraduates and is essentially the claim that every claim can be true for one person but not another.
2. Maybe worth mentioning: “dogmatism” is sometimes used to refer to the claim that if you know that P, then it is appropriate to ignore any evidence that ~P (or something like that). (Also, if you do find references to at least the McGrew piece that would be cool.)
3. Andy, I think your criticism is essentially correct; I had stupidly misread Qualia Feakism as this intentionalist claim: ~(phenomenal character supervenes on content). Now I’m not sure what the claim is supposed to be. A natural reading suggests that Qualia Freakism holds: it is impossible for an experience to be completely individuated by its content. Yet this claim strikes me as correct, not absurd. Take the content P. One might entertain P, believe P, or have an experience with the content P. (And of course, it also seems possible for one to have a visual and an auditory experience with the same content even though the experiences are distinct.) It seems, then, that for any experience with the content P, there is some other mental state with the very same content. So the content of an experience never completely individuates that experience.
Here’s a paper called “Epistemological Strategies” by C.H. Whitely in which he discussed a view he calls dogmatism and says that it has been attributed to Moore
Whiteley, C. H. (1969). Epistemological Strategies. Mind, New Series, 78(309), 25-34.
(still looking for the McGrew paper)
Perhaps my favorite comes from the van Inwagen paper mentioned already, in which he labels one of Lewis’s objections the ‘Lewis-Heidegger problem’.
You forgot one of the most prevalent terms of abuse! “Scientism”! I know Putnam’s internal realism has been called the “cookie cutter” theory. Also, I always thought “Brutalism” was a funny name for Ned Markosian’s answer to the Problem of the Many. “Mirage Realism” is Michael Devitt’s response to Armstrong “Ostrich Nominalism” name-calling.
I’m not sure Markosian’s ‘brutalism’ counts – didn’t he come up with that name himself?
Yes, I think you’re right. It’s a pretty cool name.
1. In his “brains in a vat” Putnam called a theory of reference that does not appeal to causal relations of some sort between a word-token and the object to which it refers, “a magical theory of reference”. This sounds teasing to me.
2. Scott Sturgeon (in his “matters of mind”) calls disjunctivism that don’t give a positive account of hallucinatory experience by the name “disjunctive quietism”. I’m not sure this is meant to be teasing.
The view according to which creatures that aren’t sufficiently similar to us (usually in physical structure) lack mental states similar to ours, is called “Chauvinism”. I don’t know who first came up with the title. It seems that many functionalists rejected the mind-brain type identity theory because it was Chauvinistic in this sense.