Volume 66, Numbers 1-2, 133-168, DOI: 10.1007/s10670-006-9030-1

The reality of qualia

Gary Hatfield

From the issue entitled "Perspectives on Colour Perception"

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Abstract

This paper argues for the reality of qualia as aspects of phenomenal experience. The argument focuses on color vision and develops a dispositionalist, subjectivist account of what it is for an object to be colored. I consider objections to dispositionalism on epistemological, metaphysical, and ‚ordinary’ grounds. I␣distinguish my representative realism from sense-data theories and from recent ‚representational’ or ‚intentional’ theories, and I argue that there is no good reason to adopt a physicalist stance that denies the reality of qualia as phenomenally available intentional contents in Brentano’s original sense of ‚intentionality’.

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