Physicalist philosophers of mind widely agree that an 'explanatory gap' divides conscious experience from physical brain processes, and Papineau (2011) argued that this felt gap is a cognitive artifact: we 'cannot stop ourselves' thinking about the mind–brain relation dualistically. He left open, as an empirical question for cognitive science, why the intuition of dualism persists — surveying five candidate explanations (cultural inheritance; Bloom's separate cognitive systems for minds and bodies; Papineau's own 'antipathetic fallacy'; the assumption that introspection transparently reveals the nature of experience; Melnyk's claim that phenomenal and material concepts cannot undergo normal 'file merging') and noting that all face difficulties and that deciding among them requires evidence, not armchair reflection. A decade and a half of later work has firmly established the phenomenon — adults and children robustly treat the mind as non-physical, and dualist reasoning persists even in clinicians — and has refined or formalized several of the candidate accounts (mental-files models, the 'revelation' thesis, 'conceptual encapsulation', illusionist 'Meta-Cartesianism'). But no empirical study has discriminated among the competing explanations, and one line of work (Kammerer) contests the entire error-theory framework on philosophical grounds. The problem posed here is to determine, empirically, which cognitive mechanism or mechanisms actually generate and sustain the intuition of dualism, including the discriminating tests Papineau himself specified.

Background

The 'explanatory gap' (Levine 1983) is the apparent impossibility of explaining why physical brain processes give rise to conscious, subjective experience — why pain feels like anything at all. Physicalists — those who hold that everything, including the mind, is wholly physical — have long responded with the 'phenomenal concept strategy': the gap, they argue, is an artifact of how we think about consciousness, not a fact about the world. Phenomenal concepts (the concepts we deploy when attending to experience 'from the inside', e.g. in imagination or introspection) differ cognitively from physical concepts (the neuroscientific concepts we deploy when thinking about brain states), and this difference in thought is mistakenly projected onto the referents, making identical states appear distinct. Papineau's paper 'What Exactly is the Explanatory Gap?' (2011) develops this error theory: the feeling of an unbridgeable gap 'arises only because we cannot stop ourselves thinking about the mind–brain relation in a dualist way'. The 'intuition of dualism' here is a psychological attitude — the spontaneous conviction that conscious states are distinct from any physical state — not the truth of dualism itself.

Crucially, Papineau's argument makes the source of this attitude load-bearing: if the dualist intuition is generated by some identifiable quirk of human cognition (an error, in his terms), it carries no evidential weight against physicalism. He canvassed five candidate explanations, each already present in the literature he helped create: (1) ingrained cultural inheritance from dualist religious and philosophical traditions; (2) Paul Bloom's proposal that humans are 'natural-born dualists' because distinct cognitive systems handle mindreading (theory of mind, the capacity to attribute mental states to others) and folk physics (our intuitive understanding of how physical objects behave), leaving the mind feeling non-physical; (3) the 'antipathetic fallacy' (Papineau's own coinage, from his 1993 and 2002 work): thinking about experience is accompanied by actual or re-created experience itself, whereas thinking about brain activity is not, and we wrongly project this contrast in thought onto the world, concluding the referents must differ; (4) the assumption that introspection should transparently reveal the essential nature of experience — the 'revelation' thesis — so that anything physical leaves out what experience seems to reveal; and (5) Andrew Melnyk's suggestion that phenomenal and material concepts, being handled by different parts of the brain, cannot undergo the normal 'file merging' by which concepts of the same thing coalesce. Papineau stated that each proposal faces difficulties, that several may be partly correct, and that choosing among them 'is an empirical matter rather than one for further armchair reflection'; he further flagged one concrete open probe: whether apparent counterexamples to the antipathetic-fallacy account really involve activation of phenomenal experience on only one side of the relevant identity claim.

Since 2011, an empirical cognitive-science literature has confirmed and sharpened the phenomenon. Forstmann and Burgmer (2015), across eight studies using duplication thought-experiments, showed that adults are 'intuitive mind-body dualists', that dualist judgment behaves like a default (it increases under cognitive load and intuitive-thinking primes), and that it is partly mediated by essentialist reasoning about the mind (treating the mind as an inner essence). Hood, Gjersoe and Bloom (2012) found that 5–6-year-old children ascribe fewer mental than physical properties to an apparently duplicated animal, supporting a developmental root of the intuition. Bering (2006) documented the afterlife-belief system arising from social-cognitive defaults; Miresco and Kirmayer (2006) showed mind–brain dualism persisting even in psychiatrists' clinical reasoning; Slingerland and Chudek (2011) found mind–body dualism pervasive in the early Chinese textual record, which complicates accounts blaming specifically Western or Abrahamic cultural inheritance; Burgmer and Forstmann (2018) trace the downstream consequences of dualist beliefs for health behavior. In parallel, philosophy of mind continued to produce competing explanations rather than adjudicating them: Kammerer (2019) argued that 'fallacy' accounts like Papineau's lack psychological plausibility and proposed introspective-illusion and lack-of-understanding alternatives; Liu (2021) argued that the revelation thesis is itself intuitive and rationally explains the dualism intuition; Melnyk (2024) proposed a novel account in terms of introspective 'conceptual encapsulation'; Thouzeau-Corpel and Murez (2024) recast the file-merging idea using the mental-files framework from cognitive science (on which the mind keeps what it knows about each individual thing in a separate 'file', and files that are discovered to be about the same thing normally merge), appealing to a 'super-transparency' constraint on phenomenal files; and Kammerer's 'House of Mirrors' (2026) — a book-length development of illusionism, the view that phenomenal consciousness as traditionally conceived is a cognitive illusion — explains the near-inextricability of the illusion within his 'Meta-Cartesianism' theory. Peng and Hagar (2025) treat intuitive dualism as an entrenched empirical datum that any science of consciousness must accommodate. Thus the phenomenon is established, the candidate explanations have multiplied rather than narrowed, and the discriminating empirical work Papineau called for remains to be done.

Problem Statement

Determine, by empirical investigation, why the intuition of dualism — the spontaneous and resilient conviction that conscious experiences are distinct from any physical brain states, which persists even in people who expressly endorse physicalism — arises and maintains itself, by discriminating among the candidate explanations canvassed by Papineau (2011): (a) ingrained cultural inheritance from dualist traditions; (b) Bloom's proposal that separate cognitive systems for mindreading and folk physics make us natural dualists; (c) the antipathetic fallacy, on which phenomenal thinking is accompanied by actual or re-created experience while physical thinking is not, and this asymmetry is wrongly projected onto the referents; (d) the assumption that introspection should transparently reveal the essential nature of experience (the revelation thesis); and (e) the failure of phenomenal and material concepts to undergo normal 'file merging' (as later formalized in mental-files models). The determination sought is which mechanism or combination of mechanisms actually operates in human cognition, resting on evidence from controlled experiments or observations capable of separating the accounts' predictions — including, as Papineau specified, the targeted investigation of whether apparent counterexamples to the antipathetic-fallacy account really involve activation of phenomenal experience on only one side of the relevant identity claim — and it thereby establishes whether the intuition of dualism is a cognitive artifact (and of what kind) rather than a datum carrying evidential weight against physicalism. Such a determination may rest on existing evidence — including syntheses or reanalyses of the controlled experiments and observations already in the literature — as well as on newly collected data; the listed accounts need not each be eliminated separately for the mechanism determination to be reached, and the artifact-versus-datum conclusion follows from that determination. The candidate explanations listed above are a starting set rather than a closed one: later or revised accounts, and the possibility that the error-theoretic framing itself fails — so that no artifact-mechanism is to be identified — fall within the scope of the question.

References

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