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Read More. The family relies on the school to help children grow up to have good jobs so they can raise and support their own families. In the process, the children become law-abiding, taxpaying citizens who support the state. From the functionalist perspective, if all goes well, the parts of society produce order, stability, and productivity.
If all does not go well, the parts of society must adapt to produce new forms of order, stability, and productivity. Functionalism emphasizes the consensus and order that exist in society, focusing on social stability and shared public values.
From this perspective, disorganization in the system, such as deviant behavior , leads to change because societal components must adjust to achieve stability. When one part of the system is dysfunctional, it affects all other parts and creates social problems, prompting social change. The functionalist perspective achieved its greatest popularity among American sociologists in the s and '50s.
While European functionalists originally focused on explaining the inner workings of social order, American functionalists focused on discovering the purpose of human behavior. Among these American functionalist sociologists was Robert K. Merton, who divided human functions into two types: manifest functions , which are intentional and obvious, and latent functions, which are unintentional and not obvious.
The manifest function of attending a place of worship, for instance, is to practice one's faith as part of a religious community. However, its latent function may be to help followers learn to discern personal values from institutional ones. With common sense, manifest functions become easily apparent. Yet this is not necessarily the case for latent functions, which often demand a sociological approach to be revealed.
Many sociologists have critiqued functionalism because of its neglect of the often negative implications of social order. Some critics, like Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci , claim that the perspective justifies the status quo and the process of cultural hegemony that maintains it. Functionalism does not encourage people to take an active role in changing their social environment, even when doing so may benefit them. Instead, functionalism sees agitating for social change as undesirable because the various parts of society will compensate in a seemingly organic way for any problems that may arise.
Updated by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph. Role functionalists identify pain with that higher-level relational property.
Realizer functionalists, however, take a functional theory merely to provide definite descriptions of whichever lower-level properties satisfy the functional characterizations.
However, if there are differences in the physical states that satisfy the functional definitions in different actual or hypothetical creatures, such theories—like most versions of the identity theory—would violate a key motivation for functionalism, namely, that creatures with states that play the same role in the production of other mental states and behavior possess, literally, the same mental states.
It may be that there are some important, more general, physical similarities between the neural states of seemingly disparate creatures that satisfy a given functional characterization see Bechtel and Mundale , Churchland , and Polger and Shapiro, —but see Aizawa and Gillett, for dissent; this issue will be discussed further in Section 6. One could counter the charge of chauvinism, of course, by suggesting that all creatures with lower-level states that satisfy a given functional characterization possess a common lower-level disjunctive state or property.
But neither alternative, for many functionalists, goes far enough to preserve the basic functionalist intuition that functional commonality trumps physical diversity in determining whether creatures can possess the same mental states. On the other hand, some functionalists—here, too, both a priori and empirical—consider realizer functionalism to be in a better position than role functionalism to explain the causal efficacy of the mental. If I stub my toe and wince, we believe that my toe stubbing causes my pain, which in turn causes my wincing.
But, some have argued Malcolm ; Kim , , if pain is realized in me by some neural event-type, then insofar as there are purely physical law-like generalizations linking events of that type with wincings, one can give a complete causal explanation of my wincing by citing the occurrence of that neural event and the properties by virtue of which it figures in those laws.
And thus it seems that the higher-level role properties of that event are causally irrelevant. This problem will be discussed further in Section 5. So far, the discussion of how to provide functional characterizations of individual mental states has been vague, and the examples avowedly simplistic.
Is it possible to do better, and, if so, which version of functionalism is likely to have the greatest success? Nonetheless I will discuss them separately to focus on what all agree to be the distinctive features of each. First, however, it is important to get more precise about how exactly functional definition is supposed to work. This can be done by focusing on a general method for constructing functional definitions introduced by David Lewis ; building on an idea of Frank Ramsey's , which has become standard practice for functionalists of all varieties.
Articulating this method will help in evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the different varieties of functionalism—while displaying some further challenges that arise for them all.
The key feature of this now-canonical method is to treat mental states and processes as being implicitly defined by the Ramsey sentence of one or another psychological theory — common sense, scientific, or something in between.
Analogous steps, of course, can be taken to produce the Ramsey-sentence of any theory, psychological or otherwise. For a still simplistic example, consider the sort of generalizations about pain introduced before: pain tends to be caused by bodily injury; pain tends to produce the belief that something is wrong with the body and the desire to be out of that state; pain tends to produce anxiety; pain tends to produce wincing or moaning.
Such a statement is free of any mental state terms. It includes only quantifiers that range over mental states, terms that denote stimulations and behavior, and terms that specify various causal relations among them. It can thus be regarded as providing implicit definitions of the mental state terms of the theory. An individual will have those mental states just in case it possesses a family of first-order states that interact in the ways specified by the theory.
Though functionalists of course acknowledge that the first-order states that satisfy the functional definitions may vary from species to species — or even from individual to individual — they specify that, for each individual, the functional definitions be uniquely satisfied.
This makes it clear that, in the classic formulations of functional theories, mental states are intended to be characterized in terms of their relations to stimulations, behavior, and all the other states that may be permissibly invoked by the theory in question, and thus certain functional theories may have more resources for individuating mental states than suggested by the crude definitions used as examples.
The next three sections will discuss the potential of various sorts of functionalist theory for giving adequate characterizations of experiential and intentional states—and also for specifying the inputs and outputs of the system. So, for example, the experience of a very reddish-orange could be partially characterized as the state produced by the viewing of a color swatch within some particular range, which tends to produce the judgment or belief that the state just experienced is more similar to the experience of red than of orange.
Analogous characterizations, of course, will have to be given of these other color experiences. The judgments or beliefs in question will themselves be partially characterized in terms of their tendencies to produce sorting or categorization behavior of certain specified kinds.
This strategy may seem fatal to analytic functionalism, which restricts itself to the use of a priori information to distinguish among mental states, since it's not clear that the information needed to distinguish among experiences such as color perceptions will result from conceptual analysis of our mental state terms or concepts.
However, this problem may not be as dire as it seems. There are limits to this strategy, however see Section 5. To switch, however, would be to give up the benefits if any of a theory that offers meaning-preserving translations of our mental state terms. There has been significant skepticism, however, about whether any functionalist theory — analytic or scientific — can capture what seems to be the distinctive qualitative character of experiential states such as color perceptions, pains, and other bodily sensations; these questions will be addressed in section 5.
Strawson , Horgan and Tienson , Kriegel , and Pitt , who suggest that intentional states have qualitative character as well. We can begin by characterizing beliefs as among other things states produced in certain ways by sense-perception or inference from other beliefs, and desires as states with certain causal or counterfactual relations to the system's goals and needs, and specify further how according to the relevant common sense or empirical theory beliefs and desires tend to interact with one another, and other mental states, to produce behavior.
Once again, this characterization is crude, and needs more detail. Moreover, there are some further questions about characterizing intentional states—particularly belief— that have emerged in recent discussions.
Once is whether a subject should be regarded as believing that p if there is a mismatch between her avowals that p and the characteristic behaviors associated with believing that p in standard circumstances: do avowals outweigh behaviors, or vice versa—or are there pragmatic factors that determine what the answer should be in different contexts? See Gendler, , and Schwitzgebel, See Staffel, , and the many contributions to Huber and Schmidt-Petri, , and Ebert and Smith, , for further discussion.
Functionalism, at least arguably, can accommodate a number of different answers to these questions, but the project of characterizing beliefs may not be straightforward. In dependently of these questions, functionalists need to say more outright or not about what makes a state a particular belief outright or not or desire, for example, the belief — or desire — that it will snow tomorrow. This permits differences and similarities in the contents of intentional states to be construed as differences and similarities in the propositions to which these states are related.
But what makes a mental state a relation to, or attitude toward, some proposition P? And can these relations be captured solely by appeal to the functional roles of the states in question?
The development of conceptual role semantics may seem to provide an answer to these questions: what it is for Julian to believe that P is for Julian to be in a state that has causal and counterfactual relations to other beliefs and desires that mirror certain inferential, evidential, and practical action-directed relations among propositions with those formal structures Field ; Loar ; Block This proposal raises a number of important questions.
One is whether states capable of entering into such interrelations can must? Another is whether idiosyncracies in the inferential or practical proclivities of different individuals make for differences in or incommensurabilities between their intentional states. This question springs from a more general worry about the holism of functional specification, which will be discussed more generally in Section 5. Twin Earth, as Putnam presents it, is a hypothetical planet on which things look, taste, smell and feel exactly the way they do on Earth, but which have different underlying microscopic structures; for example, the stuff that fills the streams and comes out of the faucets, though it looks and tastes like water, has molecular structure XYZ rather than H 2 O.
Similar conclusions, they contend, can be drawn for all cases of belief and other intentional states regarding natural kinds. The same problem, moreover, appears to arise for other sorts of belief as well.
Tyler Burge presents cases in which it seems intuitive that a person, Oscar, and his functionally equivalent counterpart have different beliefs about various syndromes such as arthritis and artifacts such as sofas because the usage of these terms by their linguistic communities differ. If these cases are convincing, then there are differences among types of intentional states that can only be captured by characterizations of these states that make reference to the practices of an individual's linguistic community.
These, along with the Twin Earth cases, suggest that if functionalist theories cannot make reference to an individual's environment, then capturing the representational content of at least some intentional states is beyond the scope of functionalism. See Section 4. On the other hand, the externalist individuation of intentional states may fail to capture some important psychological commonalities between ourselves and our counterparts that are relevant to the explanation of behavior.
Considerations about whether certain sorts of beliefs are to be externally individuated raise the related question about how best to characterize the stimulations and behaviors that serve as inputs and outputs to a system.
Should they be construed as events involving objects in a system's environment such as fire trucks, water and lemons , or rather as events in that system's sensory and motor systems? On this view inputs and outputs may be better characterized as activity in specific sensory receptors and motor neurons.
In addition, this option would not be open to analytic functionalist theories, since generalizations that link mental states to neurally specified inputs and outputs would not, presumably, have the status of conceptual truths.
Perhaps there is a way to specify sensory stimulations that abstracts from the specifics of human neural structure enough to include any possible creature that intuitively seems to share our mental states, but is sufficiently concrete to rule out entities that are clearly not cognitive systems such as the economy of Bolivia; see Block b. Clearly, the issues here mirror the issues regarding the individuation of intentional states discussed in the previous section. The previous sections were by and large devoted to the presentation of the different varieties of functionalism and the evaluation of their relative strengths and weaknesses.
There have been many objections to functionalism, however, that apply to all versions of the theory. Some of these have already been introduced in earlier discussions, but they, and many others, will be addressed in more detail here. One difficulty for every version of the theory is that functional characterization is holistic. Functionalists hold that mental states are to be characterized in terms of their roles in a psychological theory—be it common sense, scientific, or something in between—but all such theories incorporate information about a large number and variety of mental states.
Thus if pain is interdefined with certain highly articulated beliefs and desires, then animals who don't have internal states that play the roles of our articulated beliefs and desires can't share our pains, and humans without the capacity to feel pain can't share certain or perhaps any of our beliefs and desires. In addition, differences in the ways people reason, the ways their beliefs are fixed, or the ways their desires affect their beliefs — due either to cultural or individual idiosyncracies — might make it impossible for them to share the same mental states.
These are regarded as serious worries for all versions of functionalism see Stich , Putnam Some functionalists, however e. Shoemaker c , have suggested that if a creature has states that approximately realize our functional theories, or realize some more specific defining subset of the theory particularly relevant to the specification of those states, then they can qualify as being mental states of the same types as our own.
Quine , Rey For example, if pain is realized in me by some neural state-type, then insofar as there are purely physical law-like generalizations linking states of that type with pain behavior, one can give a complete causal explanation of my behavior by citing the occurrence of that neural state and the properties by virtue of which it figures in those laws.
And thus, some have argued, the higher-level role properties of that state—its being a pain—are causally irrelevant. There have been a number of different responses to this problem. Some e. Instead, some argue, causation should be regarded as a special sort of counterfactual dependence between states of certain types Loewer , , Fodor , Block , or as a special sort of regularity that holds between them Melnyk If this is correct, then functional role properties along with the other macroscopic properties of the special sciences could count as causally efficacious but see Ney for dissent.
However, the plausibility of these accounts of causation depends on their prospects for distinguishing bona-fide causal relations from those that are clearly epiphenomenal, and some have expressed skepticism about whether they can do the job, among them Crane , Kim , Jackson , Ludwig , and McLaughlin , forthcoming. On the other hand, see Lyons for an argument that if functional properties are causally inefficacious, this can be viewed as a benefit of the theory.
Yet other philosophers argue that causation is best regarded as a relation between types of events that must be invoked to provide sufficiently general explanations of behavior Antony and Levine , Burge , Baker Though many who are moved by the exclusion problem e.
Kim, Jackson maintain that there is a difference between generalizations that are truly causal and those that contribute in some other merely epistemic way to our understanding of the world, theorists who advocate this response to the problem charge that this objection, once again, depends on a restrictive view of causation that would rule out too much.
Another problem with views like the ones sketched above, some argue Kim , , is that mental and physical causes would thereby overdetermine their effects, since each would be causally sufficient for their production. And, though some theorists argue that overdetermination is widespread and unproblematic see Loewer , and also Shaffer, , and Sider , for a more general discussion of overdetermination , others contend that there is a special relation between role and realizer that provides an intuitive explanation of how both can be causally efficacious without counting as overdetermining causes.
For example, Yablo , suggests that mental and physical properties stand in the relation of determinable and determinate just as red stands to scarlet , and argues that our conviction that a cause should be commensurate with its effects permits us to take the determinable, rather than the determinate, property to count as causally efficacious in psychological explanation.
Bennett suggests, alternatively, that the realizer properties metaphysically necessitate the role properties in a way that prevents them from satisfying the conditions for overdetermination. Yet another suggestion Wilson, , , and Shoemaker, is that the causal powers of mental properties are included among or are proper subsets of the causal powers of the physical properties that realize them.
See also Macdonald and Macdonald , Witmer, , Yates, , and Strevens, , for related views. There has been substantial recent work on the causal exclusion problem, which, as noted earlier, arises for any non-reductive theory of mental states. See the entry on Mental Causation, as well as Bennett , and Funkhouser , for further discussion and extensive bibliographies. If pain is functionally defined either by an a priori or an empirical theory as the state of being in some lower-level state or other that, in certain circumstances causes wincing, then it seems that the generalization that pain causes wincing in those circumstances is at best uninformative, since the state in question would not be pain if it didn't.
And, on the Humean view of causation as a contingent relation, the causal claim would be false. Davidson b once responded to a similar argument by noting that even if a mental state M is defined in terms of its production of an action A, it can often be redescribed in other terms P such that 'P caused A' is not a logical truth. But it's unclear whether any such redescriptions are available to role vs. Some theorists e. Antony and Levine have responded by suggesting that, though mental states may be defined in terms of some of their effects, they have other effects that do not follow from those definitions which can figure into causal generalizations that are contingent, informative, and true.
For example, even if it follows from a functional definition that pain causes wincing and thus that the relation between pain and wincing cannot be truly causal , psychologists may discover, say, that pain produces resilience or submissive behavior in human beings. Such claims could be affirmed, however, if as seems likely the most plausible functional theories define sensations such as pain in terms of a small subset of their distinctive psychological , rather than behavioral, effects see section 4.
A different line of response to this worry Shoemaker d, is to deny the Humean account of causation altogether, and contend that causal relations are themselves metaphysically necessary, but this remains a minority view.
See also Bird, , and Latham, , for further discussion. We seem to have immediately available, non-inferential beliefs about these states, and the question is how this is to be explained if mental states are identical with functional properties. The answer depends on what one takes these introspective beliefs to involve.
Broadly speaking, there are two dominant views of the matter but see Peacocke , Ch. A full discussion of these questions goes beyond the scope of this entry, but the articles cited above are just three among many helpful pieces in the Open Peer Commentary following Goldman , which provides a good introduction to the debate about this issue. Another account of introspection, identified most closely with Shoemaker a,b,c,d , is that the immediacy of introspective belief follows from the fact that occurrent mental states and our introspective beliefs about them are functionally interdefined.
For example, one satisfies the definition of being in pain only if one is in a state that tends to cause in creatures with the requisite concepts who are considering the question the belief that one is in pain, and one believes that one is in pain only if one is in a state that plays the belief role, and is caused directly by the pain itself.
On this account of introspection, the immediacy and non-inferential nature of introspective belief is not merely compatible with functionalism, but required by it. But there is an objection, most recently expressed by George Bealer ; see also Hill , that, on this model an introspective belief can only be defined in one of two unsatisfactory ways: either as a belief produced by a second-order functional state specified in part by its tendency to produce that very type of belief — which would be circular — or as a belief about the first-order realization of the functional state, rather than that state itself.
Functionalists have suggested, however Shoemaker , McCullagh , Tooley , that there is a way of understanding the conditions under which beliefs can be caused by, and thus be about, one's second-order functional states that permits mental states and introspective beliefs about them to be non-circularly defined but see Bealer , for a skeptical response. A full treatment of this objection involves the more general question of whether second-order properties can have causal efficacy, and is thus beyond the scope of this discussion see section 5.
Yet another objection to functionalist theories of any sort is that they do not capture the interrelations that we take to be definitive of beliefs, desires, and other intentional states. Whereas even analytic functionalists hold that mental states— and also their contents— are implicitly defined in terms of their causal or probabilistic roles in producing behavior, these critics understand intentional states to be implicitly defined in terms of their roles in rationalizing , or making sense of , behavior.
This is a different enterprise, they claim, since rationalization, unlike causal explanation, requires showing how an individual's beliefs, desires, and behavior conform, or at least approximate, to certain a priori norms or ideals of theoretical and practical reasoning — prescriptions about which beliefs and desires we should have, how we should reason, or what, given our beliefs and desires, we ought to do.
See Davidson c, Dennett , and McDowell for classic expressions of this view. One can't, that is, extract facts from values. This is not to say, these theorists stress, that there are no causes, or empirical laws of, behavior.
These, however, will be expressible only in the vocabularies of the neurosciences, or other lower-level sciences, and not as relations among beliefs, desires and behavior.
Functionalists have replied to these worries in different ways. Many just deny the intuition behind the objection, and maintain that even the strictest conceptual analyses of our intentional terms and concepts purport to define them in terms of their bona-fide causal roles, and that any norms they reflect are explanatory rather than prescriptive. They argue, that is, that if these generalizations are idealizations, they are the sort of idealizations that occur in any scientific theory: just as Boyle's Law depicts the relations between the temperature, pressure, and volume of a gas under certain ideal experimental conditions, our a priori theory of the mind consists of descriptions of what normal humans would do under physically specifiable ideal conditions, not prescriptions as to what they should , or are rationally required , to do.
Other functionalists agree that we may advert to various norms of inference and action in attributing beliefs and desires to others, but deny that there is any in principle incompatibility between normative and empirical explanations.
They argue that if there are causal relations among beliefs, desires, and behavior that even approximately mirror the norms of rationality, then the attributions of intentional states can be empirically confirmed Fodor ; Rey In addition, many who hold this view suggest that the principles of rationality that intentional states must meet are quite minimal, and comprise at most a weak set of constraints on the contours of our theory of mind, such as that people can't, in general, hold obviously contradictory beliefs, or act against their sincerely avowed strongest desires Loar See Stich , and Levin , for discussion of this question, and for a more general debate about the compatibility of normative and psychological principles, see Rey, , and Wedgwood, Nonetheless, although many functionalists argue that the considerations discussed above show that there is no in principle bar to a functionalist theory that has empirical force, these worries about the normativity of intentional ascription continue to fuel skepticism about functionalism and, for that matter, any scientific theory of the mind that uses intentional notions.
In addition to these general worries about functionalism, there are particular questions that arise for functional characterizations of experiential or phenomenal states. These questions will be discussed in the following section. Functionalist theories of all varieties — whether analytic or empirical, FSIT or functional specification — attempt to characterize mental states exclusively in relational, specifically causal, terms.
The next three sections will present the most serious worries about the ability of functionalist theories to give an adequate characterization of these states. See Searle , G. Conversely, some argue that functional role is not necessary for qualitative character: for example, it seems that one could have mild, but distinctive, twinges that have no typical causes or characteristic effects.
All these objections purport to have characterized a creature with the functional organization of normal human beings, but without any, or the right sort, of qualia or vice versa , and thus to have produced a counterexample to functional theories of experiential states. One line of response, initially advanced by Sydney Shoemaker b , is that although functional duplicates of ourselves with inverted qualia may be possible, duplicates with absent qualia are not, since their possibility leads to untenable skepticism about the qualitative character of one's own mental states.
This argument has been challenged, however Block b; but see Shoemaker's response in d, and Balog, , for a related view , and the more common response to these objections—particularly to the absent qualia objection— is to question whether scenarios involving creatures such as Blockheads provide genuine counterexamples to functionalist theories of experiential states.
For example, some theorists Dennett ; Levin ; Van Gulick argue that these scenarios provide clear-cut counterexamples only to crude functional theories, and that attention to the subtleties of more sophisticated characterizations will undermine the intuition that functional duplicates of ourselves with absent qualia are possible or, conversely, that there are qualitative states without distinctive functional roles.
The plausibility of this line of defense is often questioned, however, since there is tension between the goal of increasing the sophistication and thus the individuative powers of the functional definitions, and the goal for analytic functionalists of keeping these definitions within the bounds of the a priori though see Section 4. A related suggestion is that absent qualia seem possible only because of our imaginative shortcomings, in particular, that it is hard for us to attend, at any one time, to all the relevant features of even the simplest functional characterization of experiential states; another is that the intuition that Blockheads lack qualia is based on prejudice—against creatures with unfamiliar shapes and extended reaction times Dennett , or creatures with parts widely distributed in space Lycan, , Schwitzgebel and commentary.
There are other responses to analogous absent qualia arguments that are prominent in the literature, but the target of those arguments is broader. Block's argument was initially presented as a challenge exclusively to functionalist theories, both analytic and empirical, and not generally to physicalistic theories of experiential states; the main concern was that the purely relational resources of functional description were incapable of capturing the intrinsic qualitative character of states such as feeling pain, or seeing red.
Indeed, in Block's b, p. But there are similar objections that have been raised against all physicalistic theories of experiential states that are important to consider in evaluating the prospects for functionalism.
These will be discussed in the next two sections. One important objection, advanced by among others Kripke and Chalmers a , derives from Descartes's well-known argument in the Sixth Meditation that since he can clearly and distinctly conceive of himself existing apart from his body and vice versa , and since the ability to clearly and distinctly conceive of things as existing apart guarantees that they are in fact distinct, he is in fact distinct from his body.
Thus, he concludes, zombies are possible, and functionalism — or, more broadly, physicalism — is false. The force of the Zombie Argument is due in large part to the way Chalmers defends its two premises; he provides a detailed account of just what is required for zombies to be conceivable, and also an argument as to why the conceivability of zombies entails their possibility see also Chalmers , , , Ch. For alternative ways of explaining conceivability, see Kripke , Hart ; for criticism of the argument from two-dimensional semantics, see Yablo , , Bealer , Stalnaker , Soames , Byrne and Prior ; but see also Chalmers Such attempts thus pose, at very least, a unique epistemological problem for functionalist or physicalist reductions of qualitative states.
In response to these objections, analytic functionalists contend, as they did with the inverted and absent qualia objections, that sufficient attention to what is required for a creature to duplicate our functional organization would reveal that zombies are not really conceivable, and thus there is no threat to functionalism and no explanatory gap.
A related suggestion is that, while zombies may now seem conceivable, we will eventually find them inconceivable, given the growth of empirical knowledge, just as we now find it inconceivable that there could be H2O without water Yablo Alternatively, some suggest that the inconceivability of zombies awaits the development of new concepts that can provide a link between our current phenomenal and physical concepts Nagel , , while others McGinn agree, but deny that humans are capable of forming such concepts.
None of these responses, however, would be an effective defense of Psychofunctionalism, which does not attempt to provide analyses of experiential concepts or suggest that there would, or could, be any to come. But there is an increasingly popular strategy for defending physicalism against these objections that could be used to defend Psychofunctionalism, namely, to concede that there can be no conceptual analyses of qualitative concepts such as what it's like to see red or what it's like to feel pain in purely functional terms, and focus instead on developing arguments to show that the conceivability of zombies neither implies that such creatures are possible nor opens up an explanatory gap.
One line of argument Block and Stalnaker ; Yablo contends that the conceivability of alleged counterexamples to psycho-physical or psycho-functional identity statements, such as zombies, has analogues in other cases of successful inter-theoretical reduction, in which the lack of conceptual analyses of the terms to be reduced makes it conceivable, though not possible, that the identities are false. However, the argument continues, if these cases routinely occur in what are generally regarded as successful reductions in the sciences, then it's reasonable to conclude that the conceivability of a situation does not entail its possibility.
A different line of argument Horgan ; Loar ; Lycan ; Hill , Hill and McLaughlin , Balog maintains that, while generally the conceivability of a scenario entails its possibility, scenarios involving zombies stand as important exceptions. Whereas conceptually independent third-personal concepts x and y may reasonably be taken to express metaphysically independent properties, or modes of presentation, no such metaphysical conclusions can be drawn when one of the concepts in question is third-personal and the other is phenomenal , since these concepts may merely be picking out the same properties in different ways.
Thus, the conceivability of zombies, dependent as it is on our use of phenomenal concepts, provides no evidence of their metaphysical possibility. Key to this line of defense is the claim that these special phenomenal concepts can denote functional or physical properties without expressing some irreducibly qualitative modes of presentation of them, for otherwise it couldn't be held that these concepts do in fact apply to our functional or physical duplicates, even though it's conceivable that they don't.
This, not surprisingly, has been disputed, and there is currently much discussion in the literature about the plausibility of this claim. See Chalmers , Holman, for criticism of this view, but see the responses of Loar , and Hill and McLaughlin , Balog, , Levin, , forthcoming, Diaz-Leon, , ; see also see Levin , , and Shroer, , for the presentation, if not endorsement, of a hybrid view.
Though neither Nagel nor Jackson now endorse this argument, many philosophers contend that it raises special problems for any physicalistic view see Alter , and, in response, Jackson
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