Rule-Following and Consciousness: Old Problem or New?

It has recently been claimed that there is a “new hard problem” for physicalism. The new hard problem, according to Goff (Philosophical Studies, 160, 223–235, 2012), is based on “semantic phenomenology”, the view that conscious perceptual experience represents linguistic expressions as having determinate meanings. Goff argues that Kripke’s rule-following argument demonstrates that it is particularly difficult for a physicalist to account for semantic phenomenology. In this paper, we argue that (a) Goff’s discussion of semantic phenomenology fails to uncover a “new” hard problem for physicalism and (b) there is a hard problem—which Goff misses—facing philosophers who accept the reality of semantic phenomenology, but that this is as much a problem for non-reductionists about meaning as it is for physicalists. All we have been given is a familiar hard problem about rule-following, not a new hard problem about consciousness.