By ANA MARIA ANDREI

166 Pages·2010·0.51 MB·English

THE NATURE AND METAPHYSICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EXPLANATORY GAP

By

ANA MARIA ANDREI

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2010
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© 2010 Ana Maria Andrei

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To my parents

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank the members of my committee for invaluable feedback on previous
versions of the dissertation. I am greatly indebted to Kirk Ludwig for abundant comments and
illuminating discussion. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Gene Witmer, who has offered
tremendous help in structuring the project, as well as helpful comments on various drafts. I wish
to thank Robert D’Amico, Franz Futterknecht and Eric Kliegerman, with whom I worked mostly
on topics unrelated to my dissertation, but who have inspired me to be bolder in my intellectual
aspirations. Thanks are also due to Bill Butchard, Christopher Lubbers and Elka Shortsleeve for
useful comments and unconditional encouragement. Last but not least, I wish to thank Emil
Badici, my husband, for insightful suggestions and for his boundless generosity.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................................................4
LIST OF TABLES...........................................................................................................................7
LIST OF FIGURES.........................................................................................................................8
ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................................9
CHAPTER
1 PRELIMINARIES..................................................................................................................10
The Explanatory Gap vs. the Gap Intuition in its Various Guises..........................................10
Some Preliminary Desiderata on an Account of the Explanatory Gap..................................14
Ascriptivism vs. Non-Ascriptivism........................................................................................16
Overview of the Project..........................................................................................................17
2 A DERIVABILITY CONSTRUAL OF THE EXPLANATORY GAP (D.
CHALMERS).........................................................................................................................21
A Simple Picture of the Explanatory Gap..............................................................................21
A Complication: Making Sense of Reductive Explanation “Modulo Phenomenology”........22
3 A GENERALIZED DERIVABILITY CONCEPTION OF THE GAP.................................33
Physics-Based Accounts of the Physical and Hempel’s dilemma..........................................33
The Lack of Generality Objection against Chalmers.............................................................45
Delimiting the Physical...........................................................................................................59
Defense of the Proposed Account of the Physical from Objections.......................................67
A Generalized Derivability Construal of the Gap and an Account of the Gap Intuition........75
4 EXPLANATORY POWER CONSTRUALS OF THE GAP.................................................82
Two Accounts of the Gap Inspired by J. Levine: NCC and TC.............................................82
A Closer Look at the Two Accounts and their Shortcomings................................................86
The Epistemic Credentials of Conceptual Non-Ascriptivism................................................93
5 THE METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE EXPLANATORY GAP...................117
From an Explanatory Gap to an Ontological Gap................................................................117
Denying the Epistemic Asymmetry......................................................................................122
The Epistemic View of Subjectivity (Sturgeon)...................................................................127
Different Kinds of Imagining/Conceiving (Hill and McLaughlin)......................................140

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Phenomenal Concepts as Recognitional (Loar)....................................................................148
The Prospects for A Posteriori Physicalism and Neutral Monism.......................................153
LIST OF REFERENCES.............................................................................................................161
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.......................................................................................................166

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LIST OF TABLES
Table page

5-1 Types of belief justification.............................................................................................129

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure page

5-1 Generative property explanation......................................................................................130

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Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

THE NATURE AND METAPHYSICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EXPLANATORY GAP
By
Ana Maria Andrei

August 2010

Chair: Kirk Ludwig
Major: Philosophy

The main goal of the present study is to answer the following two questions: First, what is
the exact nature of the explanatory gap? Second, what are the metaphysical implications of the
gap phenomenon?
In Chapters 1-4, I aim to reach a deeper understanding of the nature of the explanatory
gap phenomenon. To this end, I provide a detailed critical examination of a number of
approaches to the gap that are either suggested by the literature on the topic or inspired by some
philosophers’ discussion of related themes, and argue that in fact they mischaracterize in various
ways the difficulty they purport to represent. I also sketch my own construal of the explanatory
gap. In Chapter 5, I investigate the metaphysical consequences of the gap, and argue that the gap
phenomenon casts doubt upon both a posteriori physicalism and neutral monism, lending a
significant degree of plausibility to the view that the phenomenal is ontologically fundamental.

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CHAPTER 1
PRELIMINARIES
In Chapter 1, I draw a distinction between an explanatory gap brought on by consciousness
and a gap intuition that consciousness elicits, and whose various manifestations I lay out. I
subsequently formulate a number of preliminary adequacy criteria that a construal of the
explanatory gap should meet, and provide some background on certain views about the
semantics of linguistic expressions and about conceptual content (labeled ‘ascriptivism’ and
‘non-ascriptivism’) which are highly relevant both to the project of elucidating the nature of the
explanatory gap and to that of clarifying the metaphysical significance of the gap phenomenon. I
end by providing an overview of the project.
The Explanatory Gap vs. the Gap Intuition in its Various Guises
It is useful to distinguish between something we might call ‘the gap intuition’ and the
explanatory gap itself. To get a grip on what I mean by ‘the gap intuition,’ let us consider the
kind of puzzlement that a claim like ‘pain is the same thing as the firing of C-fibers’ tends to
elicit. (I am employing here the phenomenal concept of pain. Arguably, our ordinary concept of
pain involves in addition to the purely phenomenal constituent a further functional component
which, for the purposes of this discussion, should be set aside.) We do not quite seem to
understand how that could be true. We have the sense that this is not just a matter of lack of
factual information, as we would expect a claim like ‘pain is C-fiber firing’ to remain equally
puzzling no matter how much we found out about our physical constitution. We might even be
tempted to go so far as to suggests that ‘pain is the firing of C-fibers’ sounds like a category
mistake.
More generally, we seem to have trouble making sense of the suggestion that the
phenomenal is nothing over and above the physical. To appeal to a useful metaphor, if
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