Sensory Qualities [Paperback]

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 ofqualia. 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.

Introduction
1. Explaining Looks
2. Matching and Qualitative Identity
3. Quality Space
4. Different Modalities
5. Defining and Identifying Qualities
6. Summary and Conclusion
Appendix; Multidimensional Scaling
References, Index
Introduction
1. Explaining Looks
2. Matching and Qualitative Identity
3. Quality Space
4. Different Modalities
5. Defining and Identifying Qualities
6. Summary and Conclusion
Appendix; Multidimensional Scaling
References, Index

An interesting account of how the indiscriminability of sensory qualities fixes their place in a quality space, an abstract structure specifying particular sensory qualities in terms of the kinds of ways in which they can discriminably differ. --Times Literary Supplement

Besides offering us the most useful account of sensory qualities to have yet appeared, Clark shows himself to be a clear and sure-footed expositor of the empirical and theoretical apparatus he employs....will appeal particularly to veterans of the qualia wars who hunger and thirst after real data, worked-out examples, and minimal hand-waving. --Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

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