Functionalism and qualia

Abstract

Abstract In their paper “What Psychological States are Not” N. J. Block and J. A. Fodor raise a number of objections to the ‘functional state identity theory’ (FSIT), which says that “for any organism that satisfies psychological predicates at all, there exists a unique best description such that each psychological state of the organism is identical with one of its machine states relative to that description.”1 FSIT is a version of ‘functionalism,’ which they characterize as the more general doctrine that “the type-identity conditions for psycho¬ logical states refer only to their relations to inputs, outputs, and one another.”2 Most of the objections Block and Fodor raise they take to be objections only to FSIT, and not to functionalism more broadly construed.