Feigl's Double Knowledge of Raw Feels

Philosopher of science Herbert Feigl’s mind–brain identity theory holds that phenomenal consciousness—the “raw feels” of color, sound, pain, emotion, imagery, and thought as directly lived—is empirically identical with configurational features of neural processes. The phenomenal and neurophysiological vocabularies are neither synonymous nor intertranslatable: first-person acquaintance and third-person scientific description provide two epistemic routes to the same event. Feigl thus preserves the reality and privacy of experience while rejecting both nonphysical qualia and psychophysical laws connecting two ontologically distinct domains (Feigl, 1958/1967; Stubenberg, 1997).

Feigl's "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'" (Feigl, 1958) is considered the most systematically elaborated of the founding identity-theory texts and the one that begins from the opposite end. Where the Australians treated the physical as unproblematic and sought to accommodate the mental within it, Feigl treated raw feels—the qualitative data of direct experience—as epistemologically basic and sought to integrate them into a physicalist world picture without either eliminating them or multiplying entities (Stubenberg, 1997). His solution turns on a distinction between evidence and reference: phenomenal and neurophysiological terms differ in the kind of knowledge supporting their use, acquaintance in the one case and description in the other, but converge on a single referent, on the model of Frege's morning star and evening star. The identity is empirical and contingent rather than logical, and the dualism the theory tolerates is a dualism of evidence, not of substance or property. Feigl thus preserves phenomenal consciousness in a form the Australians were prepared to deflate, making his the least reductive of the three founding positions (i.e., Place, Feigl, Smart).

From Schlick's Double Language to Empirical Identity

Feigl's route ran through the Vienna Circle, of which he was a co-founder, and through the critical realism of Alois Riehl and the early Moritz Schlick, his doctoral supervisor. Schlick had argued that the difference between the mental and the physical is a difference between two conceptual systems rather than two regions of reality: one and the same reality, designated by the psychological and the physical systems alike. This "double-knowledge" or "double-language" theory, which Feigl credited as his greatest influence, convinced him that the mind-body problem is not a pseudoproblem (Feigl, 1960). His first treatment took the psychophysical relation to be one of logical identity, implying that psychological language could be translated into neurophysiological language (Feigl, 1934). He later abandoned translatability, recasting the identity as empirical and contingent—a thesis philosophy could outline but not corroborate.

Raw Feels as the Basic Datum

The question an identity theory must answer, in Feigl's formulation, is how raw feels are related to behavioral and neurophysiological states (Feigl, 1967). Posing it that way excludes a reductive solution from the outset. He rejected as "reductive fallacies" both eliminative materialism and radical behaviorism, which dispose of the explanandum rather than explain it, and equally the dualistic alternatives of parallelism and epiphenomenalism, which purchase the phenomena at the price of an ungrounded duplication of realities. Qualia are for Feigl the epistemologically basic reality: the egocentric account is our most immediate mode of contact with what there is, while all scientific accounts reach Being only indirectly and structurally. Consistently with this, he rejected Wittgenstein's argument against a private language and insisted on the indispensability of a subjectively understood conception of first-person

Raw Feels and the Mind–Body Problem

Feigl distinguishes several senses of “mental.” Intentional content, logical relations, behavioral dispositions, unconscious processing, and occurrent experience require different analyses. The central mind–body problem concerns sentience itself: the immediately experienced qualitative character he calls raw feels. These include not only elementary sensations but directly lived thoughts, emotions, and perceptual fields (Feigl, 1958/1967).

Unlike behaviorists, Feigl does not reduce phenomenal terms to dispositions or public performances. A subject can be acquainted with pain or color experience independently of describing its causes or displaying characteristic behavior. Unlike dualists, however, he does not infer that such acquaintance reveals a nonphysical entity. What is privately lived may be identical with what is publicly investigated by neurophysiology.

Double Knowledge Without Two Realities

Feigl initially described his position as a “double-language” theory but preferred “twofold access” or “double knowledge” because the former suggested analytic translation. A phenomenal report and a neural description can refer to one event while differing in meaning, evidence, and cognitive significance. The subject knows the event by acquaintance; scientists know it by behavioral evidence, causal theory, and ultimately neurophysiological description (Feigl, 1958/1967).

The model resembles knowing one person in different ways: direct acquaintance and biographical description need not present the same information, yet concern the same individual. Likewise, the raw feel and the neural event are not parallel occurrences. They are one process under modes of access so unlike that their identity requires empirical discovery. Privacy is therefore epistemological rather than ontological: only the subject has the relevant first-person route, but the event itself belongs to the public spatiotemporal-causal world.

Acquaintance, Description, and a Single Referent

The central core of the solution, Feigl wrote, rests on the distinction between evidence and reference: whatever behavioral evidence supports ascribing a mental state, the state ascribed is not to be confused with the evidence for the ascription (Feigl, 1967). What is had in experience, and known by acquaintance, is identical with what behavior theory and ultimately neurophysiology know by description. One referent, two epistemic routes—hence "double knowledge," and hence a dualism located at the evidential base rather than in the world. The Fregean analogy is exact and was Feigl's own: as noted, phenomenal and neurophysiological terms differ in sense while sharing reference, as "morning star" and "evening star" differ in sense while both denoting Venus.

Nomological Danglers and Parsimony

Feigl supplied the term that became the identity theory's most effective polemical instrument. Dualist psychophysical correlation laws would be "nomological danglers," hanging from the nomological net of science without further explanation—a formulation Smart adopted and made famous (Smart, 1959). The argument is one of parsimony: where evidential facts are completely correlated, however heterogeneous their qualitative character, parsimony opposes positing two sets of entities. Feigl was careful about what this establishes. The choice between monism and dualism is settled not empirically but by pragmatic justification, while the specific psychophysical identifications are matters the factual sciences must decide and philosophical analysis should not prejudge.

Why This Is Not Panpsychism

Feigl's privileging of qualia invites the objection that he has made experience fundamental and slid toward panpsychism. But the privileging is epistemological, not ontological. Physical magnitudes such as mass and field intensity are themselves distinguishable only by qualitative particularities, so reality may be called qualitative at bottom without being intrinsically psychic; qualia form part of reality, but reality comprises more (Stubenberg, 1997). What Feigl declines to do is explain the phenomenal away, and it is this refusal that distinguishes the Austrian from the Australian version.

Assessment

Feigl's account drew criticism where it is most distinctive: Paul Meehl's autocerebroscope thought experiment pressed him to clarify the relation between phenomenal predicates and raw feels (Meehl, 1966), and the semantics of acquaintance has remained contested. Kim's judgment stands, however, that the papers of Feigl and Smart established the mind-body problem as a mainstream metaphysical problem and set the physicalist parameters of the subsequent debate (Kim, 1998). Feigl's insistence that the phenomenal is real, epistemically basic, and known by acquaintance—while numerically identical to the neural—anticipates both Russellian monism and contemporary acquaintance-based responses to Jackson’s knowledge argument.

References

Feigl, H. (1934). The logical analysis of the psycho-physical problem. Philosophy of Science, 1(4), 420–445.

Feigl, H. (1958). The "mental" and the "physical." In H. Feigl, M. Scriven, & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Concepts, Theories and the Mind-Body Problem (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2, pp. 370–497). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Feigl, H. (1960). Mind-body, not a pseudoproblem. In S. Hook (Ed.), Dimensions of Mind (pp. 24–36). New York: New York University Press.

Feigl, H. (1967). The "Mental" and the "Physical": The Essay and a Postscript. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kim, J. (1998). Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Meehl, P. E. (1966). The compleat autocerebroscopist: A thought-experiment on Professor Feigl's mind-body identity thesis. In P. Feyerabend & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Mind, Matter, and Method: Essays in Philosophy and Science in Honor of Herbert Feigl (pp. 103–180). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Schlick, M. (1974). General Theory of Knowledge (A. E. Blumberg, Trans.). Vienna & New York: Springer. (Original work published 1918)

Smart, J. J. C. (1959). Sensations and brain processes. Philosophical Review, 68(2), 141–156.

Stubenberg, L. (1997). Austria vs. Australia: Two versions of the identity theory. In K. Lehrer & J. C. Marek (Eds.), Austrian Philosophy: Past and Present (pp. 125–146). Dordrecht: Kluwer.