The phenomenal concept strategy (PCS) is an approach within philosophy of mind to provide a physicalist response to anti-physicalist arguments like the explanatory gap and philosophical zombies.
[2] PCS advocates typically subscribe to[2] what Chalmers has called "type-B materialism",[3] which holds that there is an epistemic but not ontological gap between physics and subjective experience.
[4] David Papineau coined the term antipathetic fallacy to refer to the way in which we fail to see phenomenal experience in brain processing.
[8] Several philosophers have suggested that phenomenal concepts denote brain states indexically, in a similar way as saying "now" picks out a particular time.
[10]: 7 She claims this position helps resolve the explanatory gap because an a priori description alone does not suffice to express the concept; in addition, a direct experiential constitution is required.
[11] He claims that normal physical identity statements (such as that heat is molecular kinetic energy) involve two descriptions, which we can associate in our minds.
[2] He argues that phenomenal concepts are ultimately characterized either in a manner too weak to bridge the explanatory gap or too strong to themselves yield to physical explanation.
[2] Carruthers and Veillet argue that Chalmers's argument commits a fallacy of equivocation between first-person and third-person phenomenal concepts, but the authors reformulate it to avoid that problem.