Dr. Strange Levine, or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gap - HDR Progress Review Jake Taylor

My main aim in this chapter is to examine the “uneasiness” about physicalism common to self-confessed qualophile philosophers such as Nagel, Levine, and Chalmers, and to investigate the notion of explanation that such thinkers rely on when they claim the physical sciences cannot explain consciousness. I review two responses to Saul Kripke’s classic argument against the identity theory in philosophy of mind. Joseph Levine claims that Kripke discloses an epistemological ‘explanatory gap’, but that no ontological gap is revealed. Grover Maxwell uses his non-materialist physicalism to argue that Kripke is wrong in thinking there is a disanalogy between pain and heat. After explaining these views, I argue that the explanatory gap is only a problem if one expects more than one ought to expect from explanation. I am in effect arguing for epistemic humility in opposition to a belief in the perfect intelligibility of the world. My main support for this is that the desire for perfect intelligibility of the world gives rise to attempts to bridge the explanatory gap by way of elaborate metaphysics. In Maxwell’s case we see a version of panpsychism considered as a potential way of crossing the gap. I claim that such metaphysics is unfounded, and I conclude by arguing that it does not even achieve what it sets out to achieve: the epistemological gap remains unbridged even with the most baroque ontological spans. If my arguments are valid, it follows that Levine’s explanatory gap is not a problem for physicalists but for the science of mind, and this is so regardless of the metaphysic the scientist adopts. I conclude by suggest that this is because properly understood his explanatory gap is a marriage of two sceptical problems, namely, the problem of induction and the problem of other minds.