Consciência e Luminosidade

Type physicalism is the view that every instantiated mental property or type of mental state is identical to some physical property or type of brain state. This talk tackles the question whether a familiar modal argument against type physicalism, inspired in well-known arguments deployed by Saul Kripke and David Chalmers, is implicitly committed to some form of luminosity with respect to phenomenal or conscious mental states. As introduced by Timothy Williamson in his book Knowledge and Its Limits, the notion of luminosity applied to phenomenal states or experiences boils down to the following two claims (a) if a subject s is in a phenomenal state e at a time t, then s is in a position to know at t that s is in e (if someone is in pain on a given occasion, then she is in a position to know on the occasion that she is in pain) (b) if a subject s is not in a phenomenal state e at a time t, then s is in a position to know at t that s is not in e (if someone is not in pain on a given occasion, then she is in a position to know on the occasion that she is not in pain). The talk argues that the modal argument in question, on at least one natural reading of it, is indeed committed to the view that phenomenal states, taken as mental states individuated by their characteristic phenomenology, are luminous in the above sense. On the assumption that Williamson´s arguments against the luminosity of the mental are in the end forceful, one would then be able to block the modal argument on that basis, being thus in a position to rescue type physicalism from some such line of attack.Departamento de Filosofia, Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa, ULisboa - Universidade de Lisbo