Sensory Qualities (Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy)

Many philosophers doubt that one can provide any successful explanation of those qualities characterizing how things look, feel, or seem to a perceiving subject. To do so one would need to be able to explain qualitative facts in non-qualitative terms, and attempts to construct such an explanation seem doomed to failure. In this book Austen Clark presents an analysis of sensory qualities that refutes such skepticism and offers the possibility of a solution to the problem of qualia. Drawing on work in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology, he analyzes the character and defends the integrity of psychophysical explanations of qualitative facts, arguing that the structure of such explanations is sound and potentially successful.