Chalmers’s Naturalistic Dualism: The Irrelevance of the Mind-Body Problem to the ScientificStudy of Consciousness

The author contends that Daniel Dennett's work on consciousness should be understood not as a completed theory but as a proposal for reconceptualizing the subject to make it amenable to scientific study, and that this reconceptualization points the way forward for consciousness research. The author argues that Dennett's approach succeeds where Edmund Husserl's project of 'scientific phenomenology' was abandoned by his students, and that criticisms of Dennett's account often miss this point.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract If the scientific study of consciousness was once neglected-as almost every book published on the subject begins by reminding us-the opposite has been the case during the past decade. Shelves groan with recent books, articles, and new journals as cognitive scientists crowd into the space left vacant since the project of “scientific phenomenology,” as Edmund Husserl imagined it, was abandoned by his closest but skeptical students. In 1991, Daniel Dennett published Consciousness Explained, which implied, in its bold title, that where Husserl had failed, the contemporary synthesis of cognitive scientific disciplines has already succeeded. Dennett’s apparent hubris inevitably produced a backlash, a storm of claims to the effect that his story is satisfying only to the extent that it avoids the supposedly difficult problems. I have dealt elsewhere (Ross, 1994) with the objections raised by the first wave of critics. Dennett, I argued, has not so much produced a theory of consciousness, in the standard sense of the term, as a set of suggestions for reconceptualizing the subject so as to make it amenable to scientific study. It remains my view that this reconceptualization shows the way forward.