Sensory Qualities
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Description
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.Reviews
"An interesting account of how the indiscriminability of sensory qualities fixes their place in a "quality space," an abstract structure specifying particular sensory qualities in terms of the kinds of ways in which they can discriminably differ."--Times Literary Supplement
"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....will appeal particularly to veterans of the qualia wars who hunger and thirst after real data, worked-out examples, and minimal hand-waving."--Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
"The presentation is informative and well argued, providing the best philosophical explication that I have seen of the conceptual structure of standard psychophysical explanation. Furthermore, Clark makes excellent use of another important work largely neglected in the qualia literature, Nelson Goodman's The Structure of Appearance....Sensory Qualities is thus an important and much-needed contribution to the philosophy of psychology, one that subsequent discussions of qualia cannot afford to ignore."--The Philosophical Review
"Psychologists may be pleasantly surprised to discover that Clark not only takes the questions of sensory qualia seriously but is eager to assert, without resorting to eliminative materialism, that psycho-physical and physiological evidence can be mustered to help "explain qualia." To those, like me, who sympathize with his approach, Clark ministers an agreeable marriage between philosophy and neuroscience."--Contemporary Psychology
