Sensory Qualities

Many philosophers doubt that one can provide any successful explanation of sensory qualities - of 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.

Austen Clark presents an analysis of sensory qualities that refutes such scepticism and offers the possibility of a solution to the problem of qualia. Drawing on work in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology, he analyses the character and defends the integrity of psychophysical explanations of qualitative facts, arguing that the structure of such explanations is sound and potentially successful. Clark gives a compact picture of that unified scheme that emerges from this project and sketches its potential reduction to neurophysiology. He does not claim to have a full explanation or a complete reduction of qualitative facts; rather, he shows that a solution to the problem of sensory qualities is possible, and outlines the structures within which it may yet be found.