I’ve been told that this essay supports the position of ‘illusionism’.
I don’t think this is correct. The illusionist position is that the only actual explananda are our beliefs about phenomenal properties (or rather, the brain-states responsible for utterances like “pain is bad”, since beliefs are another folk-psychological concept supposedly ripe for elimination): once those are accounted for, there will be nothing left to explain and no reason to continue believing in qualia.
For an attack on the reliability of our common-sense beliefs about qualia to constitute a defense of illusionism, we would have to think that our belief in qualia would be unjustified were it not for those intuitions. But this is begging the question—if phenomenal properties do exist and we do have first-hand access to them, then that, not common-sense, is our principal justification for believing in them.
I clarified with the person who I thought had said that and they seem to agree with you. It turns out they were actually referring to other discussions I had with them. I personally don’t know enough about illusionism to comment on it myself, but I’ll defer to you both and remove that sentence.
I don’t think this is correct. The illusionist position is that the only actual explananda are our beliefs about phenomenal properties (or rather, the brain-states responsible for utterances like “pain is bad”, since beliefs are another folk-psychological concept supposedly ripe for elimination): once those are accounted for, there will be nothing left to explain and no reason to continue believing in qualia.
For an attack on the reliability of our common-sense beliefs about qualia to constitute a defense of illusionism, we would have to think that our belief in qualia would be unjustified were it not for those intuitions. But this is begging the question—if phenomenal properties do exist and we do have first-hand access to them, then that, not common-sense, is our principal justification for believing in them.
I clarified with the person who I thought had said that and they seem to agree with you. It turns out they were actually referring to other discussions I had with them. I personally don’t know enough about illusionism to comment on it myself, but I’ll defer to you both and remove that sentence.
Thanks for the correction :)