UC San Diego

Phenomenal contrast arguments (henceforth, PCAs) comprise the most important and widely used strategy for showing that particular mental features contribute to the phenomenal character of experience. Siegel (2006, 2007, 2009, 2010b) famously uses PCAs to argue that visual phenomenal experience represents such “high level properties” as causation, subject-independence, kind properties (being a pine tree, being a word of Russian), and more. Strawson (1994), Siewert (1998), Horgan and Tienson (2002), Chudnoff (2015a,b), and Kriegel (2015) have used versions of the same argument form to argue for the view that cognitive mental states contribute their own, non-sensory phenomenology to our overall experience (the so-called “cognitive phenomenology view). In this paper we’d like to bring out a general obstacle for PCAs that has not been widely discussed, and to offer reasons for being skeptical that it can be overcome in individual cases.