Powerful qualities in type B physicalism
Type B physicalism is a view in philosophy of mind, and "powerful qualities" (PQ) theory is a view in the metaphysics of properties. They share an important similarity: they both combine conceptual dualism with ontic monism. Type B physicalists hold that phenomenal concepts (e.g. concepts of reddish experience) are not analytically definable in terms of physical concepts, yet can co-refer ("pain is C-fiber firing" being a simplified example), and that every property is a physical property. PQ theorists claim that there are both qualitative concepts (referring to qualities such as the redness of a red object) and dispositional concepts (referring to tendencies such as the disposition to reflect ~700nm light), and that every property is both really qualitative and really dispositional; hence, qualitative concepts co-refer with dispositional concepts. I suggest that type B physicalism combines well with powerful qualities theory. First, generalizing phenomenal concepts to qualitative concepts makes phenomenal concept theory less ad hoc. Second, considering "phenomenally conscious" as a secondary qualitative concept, and considering un-conscious qualities to exist, yields a more comprehensible theory. Third, philosophical debates about the two views are similar, and type B physicalists find themselves in a similar dialectical place to PQ theorists. Background I take type B physicalism to be the conjunction of three theses: Physicalism: There are no non-physical mental properties. Here, a property is physical if it is specified by a physical predicate, and a physical predicate is a predicate definable in terms of the predicates of fundamental physics, or in other words, a predicate logically supervenient on those of fundamental physics. Such predicates include Fodor's "wildly disjunctive" functional predicates and ordinary scientific predicates. I take it that two predicates can refer to the same property, the way two nouns can refer to the same thing ("Hespherus is Phos