The Copula Theory of Experience Makes Experience the Mark of the Mental

By reprising a venerable Cartesian-Husserlian-Cantabridgean tradition, some people have recently maintained that the mark of the mental (MOM), i.e., the necessary and sufficient conditions in order for something—a property, an event, a state—to be mental, is for that state to be an experience, viz. to be featured by a certain phenomenal character, i.e., a certain what-it-is-like, whether sensuous or not (as people believing in so-called non-sensuous phenomenology hold, e.g. Pitt 2004; Kriegel 2015; Montague 2016), so as for the experience to be phenomenally aware/conscious—e.g. Strawson (2004, 2008), Gertler (2007), Nida-Rümelin (2017). By developing what actually is a new option of the so-called acquaintance theories of phenomenal awareness, I claim that phenomenal awareness simply contributes to make an experience a state in which the qualitative intrinsic property F featuring it is truthfully predicated, viz. instantiated, by its instantiator, a subject, in a mode different from the mode in which it is instantiated by its instantiator in the underlying neural state F also features. In other words, the fact that such an instantiator is F means different things, depending on whether F is truthfully predicated of her in the experiential-constitutive way, thereby determining an experience, or in a non-experiential-constitutive way, thereby determining a merely neural state on which the experience necessarily supervenes. Let me call this theory the copula theory of experience.