Sensory Qualities

ISBN-13: 9780198236801 / Angielski / Miękka / 1996 / 264 str.

Austen Clark

Opis

Many philosophers doubt that one can provide any successful explanation of those qualities characterizing how things look, feel, or seem to a perceiving subject. To do so one would need to be able to explain qualitative facts in non-qualitative terms, and attempts to construct such an explanation seem doomed to failure. In this book Austen Clark presents an analysis of sensory qualities that refutes such skepticism and offers the possibility of a solution to the problem of qualia. Drawing on work in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology, he analyzes the character and defends the integrity of psychophysical explanations of qualitative facts, arguing that the structure of such explanations is sound and potentially successful.

Recenzje

Besides offering us the most useful account of sensory qualities to have yet appeared, Clark shows himself to be a clear and sure-footed expositor of the empirical and theoretical apparatus he employs ... This is truly psychophysics for philosophers. It will appeal particularly to veterans of the qualia wars who hunger and thirst after real data, worked-out examples, and minimal hand-waving.

O autorze

Austen Clark is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Psychological Models and Neural Mechanisms: An Examination of Reductionism in Psychology (Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy, 1980).