Thoughts on Dennett’s "Quining Qualia"
Here, I avoided discussing the view that there are no qualia.
In this post, I will discuss that view. I’ll summarize and provide evaluative comments on Dennett’s Quining Qualia. I’ll address many (though not all) of his “intuition pumps” and consider whether or not they demonstrate his thesis.
*Note: this is my Substack sandbox. It’s a web workshop, a phrontistery. The following comments are first-drafty and not a finished product I’d send for peer-reviewed publication.
Dennett defines ‘qualia’ as “the ways things seem to us.” He is referring to our experiences of things, to what it is like to be or experience something. Suppose you bite into an orange, sip coffee, or catch a scent of cinnamon. Those experiences have qualitative aspects, such as how the orange tastes to you (tangy, sweet, etc.) or what it is like for you to smell the cinnamon.[1]
Dennett indicates his goal is to show that, given the vagueness of ‘qualia’ and dearth of reasons to believe that there are such things, it is “far better to declare that there simply are no qualia.” Dennett wants to “quine” qualia (i.e., to deny resolutely that qualia exist) and support that denial with sufficient reasons.
What is his method of reasoning? He tells us: rather than using rigorous and formal arguments – which he says: “only work on well-defined materials” – he plans to provide “intuition pumps” to destroy the reader’s confidence in the idea that qualia exist. These intuition pumps serve as thought experiments designed to motivate doubt about qualia.
The introduction is clear and astutely written. Dennett presents his thesis and introduces his plan to defend it. So far, so good.
In intuition pump # 1, Dennett provides examples of tasting orange juice, maple syrup, coffee, etc. to challenge the idea that there is a way things seem to the taster that is real and independent of situational factors that might influence the tasting, such as non-qualitative external stimulation, dispositions to behave, etc. Dennett doubts that we can “isolate the qualia from everything else that is going on.” He claims that it is “a fundamental mistake” to suppose that there is a basic qualitative property.
In this first pump, Dennett expresses doubt, but his examples don’t offer much to motivate the reader’s doubt, nor are they successful in supporting Dennett’s efforts to quine qualia. At this point, he seems to say: “It’s epistemically possible that there are no qualia separate from these non-qualitative factors. Thus, it’s a mistake to think that there are such qualia.” That alone is not a good argument. As it stands, it’s a non sequitur. But he’s just warming up. This is not his final argument. I want to be charitable and wait for the remaining pumps.
In pump #2, Dennett cites the wine-tasting machine to provide detail about our supposed qualia. Qualia are ineffable, intrinsic, simple, and thus unanalyzable, which in part explains why qualia is ineffable. One cannot precisely describe them because they are simple and unanalyzable; there is nothing to break down for description.[2] Moreover, qualia are essentially private. My qualia are accessible to me only; yours are for you only; etc. No, President Clinton, your famous “I feel your pain” is not literally true. Nobody can feel someone else’s pain, since qualitative pain (assuming it exists) is essentially private. I can feel my pain, and mine might be like yours, but I can’t feel yours.
In addition, qualia are supposed to be directly accessible to one’s awareness. One’s pain experiences are immediately present and infallible to the feeler. If you feel pain, you can’t be wrong that you feel it if your belief that you feel it is based on the directly accessible feeling. If you are being appeared to redly when you look at the color of a rose, you can’t be wrong that it seems to you that you see red, even if the actual color of the rose is not red. As Bob Marley put it, “who feels it knows it.” (Running Away, 1977)
Dennett shuts this pump by claiming to suspect that many believers in qualia are wishful thinkers: they believe because “they want so much for qualia to be acknowledged.” Is that a fair claim? Fitting for a philosophy paper? In any case, he asserts about qualia: “there are no such things. The term “fosters nothing but confusion.”
Dennett’s work to identify features of qualia such as ineffability and simplicity is helpful. But so far, it’s unclear why one should deny their existence. It remains open to the reader to ask: where’s the supporting argument? The case looks thin so far.
Pump # 3 is based on Locke’s question about inverted qualia. “How do I know that you and I see the same subjective color when we look at something?”[3] The point of the pump is to reinforce the intuition that qualia are private and ineffable.
Pump #4 (the Brainstorm Machine) is provided to motivate doubt that intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible. Again, qualia are private.
Pump #5 (the Neurosurgical Prank) seems to present empirical evidence for the existence of qualia. However, pump # 6 (Alternative Neurosurgery) suggests that the reasoning in #5 was “a mistake.” Here, an evil neurosurgeon inverts your color qualia, either by (a): modifying your channel for receiving optic stimuli so that your later neural events “downstream” are opposite their original and normal values (e.g., you might have a yellowish experience of something that is red and would have been experienced by you as red had the neuroscientist not used you for his shenanigans); or (b) inverting your faculty of memory so that you cannot compare today’s experience of red with those of the past and thus can’t confirm that today’s reddish experience is a reddish experience that fits your history of reddish experiences. Dennett thinks that this pump shows that our qualia is unknowable to us, not immediately accessible by us, and not a matter of acquaintance. Since we can’t know if (a) or (b) is the case, qualia aren’t necessarily directly accessible, etc. Or so Dennett says.
But it seems to me that the sixth pump shows that how our qualia is generated might not be accessible to us in cases like this. We don’t know how to explain such matters. However, that we have qualitative experience is not destroyed by this pump. If it seems to Jones that he is seeing red, i.e., if he is being appeared to redly, then it seems reasonable to say that he is having that experience and that it is directly accessible to him even if he can’t explain how the experience came about, whether it can be accounted for in terms of (a), (b), or some other way, etc.
Pump #7 is the interesting case of the coffee tasters Chase and Sanborn. Chase claims he once liked a coffee taste he no longer likes, though the flavor itself hasn’t changed. Sanborn also claims that he also no longer likes the coffee taste (again, a flavor which hasn’t changed). But there’s a difference between the two changes. Chase believes he has become a more sophisticated coffee drinker and thus no longer enjoys the “rookie-level” coffee flavor he once liked. But Sanborn believes that his physical mechanism for tasting has changed, i.e., that his taste buds or some other part of his “taste-analyzing perceptual machinery” has changed.
Dennett then introduces three explanations for Chase’s diachronic taste evolution and three for Sanborn’s. It’s not clear which of the explanations (if any) is correct. Dennett claims that the inability to know which explanation is correct undermines the (supposed) infallibility of qualia.
I’m skeptical. To claim that a quale is infallibly known by its experiencer is (at least in part) to say that one cannot be wrong that, presently, he is being appeared to in the given way, i.e., that he is now having that experience. It seems to me the infallibilist doesn’t claim that the experiencer is infallible about the correct explanation for diachronic taste changes. Both Chase and Sanborn can claim to know infallibly that, at time t, the coffee tastes some way to them, even if they can’t explain why the present gustatory experience seems different from similar ones prior to t. It seems to me that Dennett is subtly conflating the qualitative experience itself, which supposedly is a case of knowledge by acquaintance, with the various accounts for why such experiences might change over time — which is a propositional matter.
Pump #9 is about the experienced beer drinker who, though not liking his first sip of beer, now likes the beer. Did he acquire a taste for the beer? I.e., did he by repeated exposure adapt to enjoy the taste he initially disliked? Is beer an acquired taste?
Suppose beer is not an acquired taste. Rather, “prolonged beer drinking leads people to experience a taste they enjoy, but precisely their enjoying the taste guarantees that it is not the taste they first experienced.” In other words, prolonged experience tasting beer leads to a new taste, not to the acquisition of an appreciation for the original flavor. Dennett thinks this conclusion “wreaks havoc” for the “traditional view of qualia” by indicating that qualia isn’t an intrinsic property but instead an extrinsic (relational) property. The new flavor that the experienced drinker enjoys is different from the original and generated by external relational properties linked to the drinker’s attitudes, reactions, etc., which are taken to be extrinsic factors.
But why must one draw this conclusion? Why can’t it be the case that the drinker comes to enjoy the very way the first sip of beer tasted? Why can’t one adapt to that flavor? Dennett doesn’t give a clear reason. He merely asserts: “No one comes to enjoy the way the first sip tasted.” Perhaps the flavor of the initial sip remains present in the experienced sip, and repeated exposure to that very flavor enables the sipper to develop an educated appreciation for it (the same flavor).
Suppose you step into a hot tub. The water feels too hot for you. You step right out. “Too much!” you exclaim. But your physical trainer encourages you to climb back in. “The heat is good for you,” he says. So, you climb back in. The temperature is the same, and it still feels too hot. But you push through the discomfort, perhaps via repeating the ‘in-out’ exercise a few times. Now, 5-10 minutes later, though the water is the same temperature, you have adapted, and it feels better to you. You now appreciate the very way the water initially felt. The intrinsic quale has not changed. You have adapted to it, acquired an appreciation for it. Such a situation is conceivable. The heat you once disliked you now like, just like the beery bitterness you once disliked you now like.
Or suppose Jones likes chocolate. He eats a bar, which he enjoys. Then he eats another. “Still good!” he says. Then he opts for a third, and a fourth. By the fifth bar, he is sick. He no longer likes the taste present in the first bar. The intrinsic quale of the flavor of the first bar hasn’t changed. Jones experiences that very flavor in the fifth bar. But Jones has changed. He has grown sick of the taste. He is not sick of some new taste, but of the original taste. Again, this situation is conceivable. Hence, I don’t think Dennett can rule it out with a mere assertion that “no one” adapts in this way.
Dennett then provides an argument against the existence of intrinsic properties: we can’t quite define them in a clear manner that can meet public scrutiny (he says), and thus they probably don’t exist. Well, it’s no surprise that we can’t quite define them, if we assume they are ineffable and private!
After further pumping, Dennett concludes that “nothing fits the bill” of being ineffable, intrinsic, private, and directly apprehensible -- as qualia are supposed to be, and thus that “there are no qualia at all.”(22
Dennett is an outstanding builder of thought experiments that “pump” our intuitions, helping us to flesh out their various features and ponder them. Quining Qualia highlights Dennett’s skill in this area. However, I’m not convinced that his pumps are sufficient to prove that qualia don’t exist. He has raised plenty of content to consider, but his claim to have “flushed away” qualia seems more a matter of gasconade or rhetorical swagger than definitive conclusion.
Of course, as usual, there is more to say. Perhaps later.
[1] Can this scent be wholly described? Maybe not. Try it.
[2] Dennett raises an important point: if qualia are simple, then how can they have multiple properties? The properties of being directly accessible, private, ineffable, etc. would seem to be the same property. But they are different properties. Or so it seems. I’ll set this point aside for now.
[3] This question occurred to me as a kid, and I found it wonderful. Still do. Looking back, I realize that I was pondering a philosophical question, though I didn’t realize the philosophical nature of the question at the time.