THE GAP IS SEMANTIC,NOT EPISTEMOLOGICAL

This paper explores an alternative to the metaphysical challenge to physicalism posed by Jackson and Kripke and to the epistemological one exemplified by the positions of Nagel, Levine and McGinn. On this alternative the mind‐body gap is neither ontological nor epistemological, but semantic. I claim that it is because the gap is semantic that the mind‐body problem is a quintessentially philosophical problem that is not likely to wither away as our natural scientific knowledge advances. ¹ 1 I would like to thank my colleague James Tartaglia for a number of fruitful discussions on the explanatory gap.