`There's Something It's Like' and the Structure of Consciousness

Abstract

For an experience to be phenomenally conscious is for there to be something it’s like; our talk about phenomenal consciousness accordingly is permeated by the expression ‘there’s something it’s like’. It would be natural for the linguistically inclined philosopher to react to this situation by trying to advance investigations into the nature of phenomenal consciousness by determining what we mean by that expression: after all, if discourse about phenomenal consciousness accurately reflects the nature of its subject matter, that nature should be at least partly revealed in the meaning of the most central expressions in that discourse. A recent theory of the syntactic and semantic properties of ‘there’s something it’s like’, presented in service of gaining insight into the structure of consciousness itself, appears in Lormand 2004; the twin purposes of the present article are to evaluate Lormand’s story, and thereby to bolster our understanding of the meaning of ‘there’s something it’s like’. 1 Lormand’s analysis, as provided in section 2 of his essay, has a startling consequence: the inner sense theory of consciousness is analyti-Thanks for recent discussions to James John, Peter Ludlow, and Jessica Wilson and for helpful comments to an anonymous referee. I have discussed the subject matter in this essay with many over the years, including Carl Ginet, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Harold