quale See QUALIA. qualia (singular: quale), those properties of mental states or events, in particular of sensations and perceptual states, which determine ‘what it is like’ to have them. Sometimes ‘phenomenal properties’ and ‘qualitative features’ are used with the same meaning. The felt difference between pains and itches is said to reside in differences in their ‘qualitative character,’ i.e., their qualia. For those who accept an ‘actobject’ conception of perceptual experience, qualia may include such properties as ‘phenomenal redness’ and ‘phenomenal roundness,’ thought of as properties of sense-data, ‘phenomenal objects,’ or portions of the visual field. But those who reject this conception do not thereby reject qualia; a proponent of the adverbial analysis of perceptual experience can hold that an experience of ‘sensing redly’ is so in virtue of, in part, what qualia it has, while denying that there is any sense in which the experience itself is red. Qualia are thought of as non-intentional, i.e., non-representational, features of the states that have them. So in a case of ‘spectrum inversion,’ where one person’s experiences of green are ‘qualitatively’ just like another person’s experiences of red, and vice versa, the visual experiences the two have when viewing a ripe tomato would be alike in their intentional features (both would be of a red, round, bulgy surface), but would have different qualia.
Critics of physicalist and functionalist accounts of mind have argued from the possibility of spectrum inversion and other kinds of ‘qualia inversion,’ and from such facts as that no physical or functional description will tell one ‘what it is like’ to smell coffee, that such accounts cannot accommodate qualia. Defenders of such accounts are divided between those who claim that their accounts can accommodate qualia and those who claim that qualia are a philosophical myth and thus that there are none to accommodate.
See also PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, QUALITIE. S.Sho.