I find it important in philosophy to be on the clear what you mean. It is one thing to explain and another to define what you mean. You might point to a yellow object and say yellow and somebody that misunderstood might think that you mean “roundness” by yellow. The accuracy is most important when the views are radical and talk in very different worlds. And “disproving” yellow by not being able to pick it out from ostensive differentation is not an argumentative victory but a communicative failure.
Even if we use some other term I think that meaning is important to have. “Plogiston” might sneak in claims but that is just the more reason to have terms that have as little room for smuggling as possible. And we still need good terms to talk about burning. “oxygen” literally means “black maker” but we nowadays understand it as a term to refer to a element which has definitionally very little to do with the color black.
I think the starting point that generated the word refers to a genuine problem. Having qualia in category three would mean that you claim that I do not have experiences. And if qualia is a bad loaded word to refer to the thing to be explained it would be good to make up a new term that refers to that. But to me qualia was just that word. I word like “dark matter” might experience similar “highjack pressure” by having wild claims thrown around about it. And there having things like “warm dark matter”, “wimpy dark matter” makes the classification more fine making the conceptual analysis proceed. But requirements of clear thinking are different from tradition preservance. If you say that “warm dark matter” can’t be the answer the question of dark matter still stands. Even if you succesfully argue that “qualia” can’t be a attractive concept the issue of me not being a p-zombie still remains and it would be expected that some theorethical bending over backwards would happen.
I find it important in philosophy to be on the clear what you mean. It is one thing to explain and another to define what you mean. You might point to a yellow object and say yellow and somebody that misunderstood might think that you mean “roundness” by yellow. The accuracy is most important when the views are radical and talk in very different worlds. And “disproving” yellow by not being able to pick it out from ostensive differentation is not an argumentative victory but a communicative failure.
Even if we use some other term I think that meaning is important to have. “Plogiston” might sneak in claims but that is just the more reason to have terms that have as little room for smuggling as possible. And we still need good terms to talk about burning. “oxygen” literally means “black maker” but we nowadays understand it as a term to refer to a element which has definitionally very little to do with the color black.
I think the starting point that generated the word refers to a genuine problem. Having qualia in category three would mean that you claim that I do not have experiences. And if qualia is a bad loaded word to refer to the thing to be explained it would be good to make up a new term that refers to that. But to me qualia was just that word. I word like “dark matter” might experience similar “highjack pressure” by having wild claims thrown around about it. And there having things like “warm dark matter”, “wimpy dark matter” makes the classification more fine making the conceptual analysis proceed. But requirements of clear thinking are different from tradition preservance. If you say that “warm dark matter” can’t be the answer the question of dark matter still stands. Even if you succesfully argue that “qualia” can’t be a attractive concept the issue of me not being a p-zombie still remains and it would be expected that some theorethical bending over backwards would happen.