Sensory Qualities

ISBN-13: 9780198240013 / Angielski / Twarda / 1993 / 264 str.

William R. Clark; Austen Clark; William R. 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

Sensory Qualities is a clearly written, informative, and stimulating book ... contains clear accounts of interesting results in the psychophysics and neurophysiology of taste, smell and sound, and an appendix that explains the techniques of multidimensional scaling. Its major contribution ... is to have presented a fruitful and interesting way to think about the qualitative character of experience. It may not change minds about the standard arguments against physicalistic theories of qualia, but, in my view, it should.