Timeline of type B physicalism

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Year Event type Details
1956 Publication Ullin Place publishes "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?", helping establish mind-brain identity theory, a precursor to later Type-B physicalism.[1]
1959 Publication J. J. C. Smart publishes "Sensations and Brain Processes", defending the identity theory while acknowledging the apparent distinctness of experience and brain states.[2]
1966 Publication David Lewis publishes "An Argument for the Identity Theory", defending psychophysical identity through theoretical identification and scientific reduction — Lewis's first published philosophy paper, and one of the earliest statements of the Ramsey-style functional-definition approach he would later develop into a key tool for Type-B physicalism.[3]
1968 Publication David Armstrong publishes A Materialist Theory of the Mind, developing a sophisticated scientific materialism that would influence later Type-B approaches.[4]
1970 Publication David Lewis (philosopher) publishes "How to Define Theoretical Terms", providing a framework for psychophysical identifications through theoretical reduction.[5]
1972 Publication David Lewis publishes "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications", arguing that psychophysical identities should be understood as implied by the theories that make them possible rather than posited independently, refining the Ramsey-style functional-definition approach from his 1966 and 1970 papers into the form most often cited by later Type-B physicalists.[6]
1974 Thought experiment Thomas Nagel publishes "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", arguing that subjective experience presents a special explanatory challenge for physicalism — any reductive account of mind seems to leave out the subjective "what it is like" character of experience — and helping motivate later Type-B responses that try to preserve physicalism without denying this subjective character.[7]
1980 Thought experiment Saul Kripke publishes Naming and Necessity in book form, arguing that identities such as "pain = C-fiber firing" appear contingent, creating a major challenge for materialist theories of mind.[8]
1980 Publication David Lewis publishes "Mad Pain and Martian Pain", defending functionalist and physicalist approaches to mental states.[9]
1982 Knowledge argument Frank Jackson introduces the Mary thought experiment in "Epiphenomenal Qualia", arguing that physical knowledge may be incomplete.[10]
1983 Publication Joseph Levine publishes "Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap", coining the term "explanatory gap" and posing a central challenge that later Type-B physicalists would need to answer.[11]
1989 Publication Colin McGinn publishes "Can We Solve the Mind–Body Problem?", arguing that the explanatory gap reflects a permanent limitation of human cognitive faculties ("cognitive closure") rather than evidence against physicalism — a naturalistic but non-Type-B response to the gap (closer to what Chalmers would later classify as Type-C materialism) that nonetheless sharpened the explanatory-gap debate Type-B physicalists needed to answer.[12]
1990 Publication Brian Loar publishes "Phenomenal States", arguing that the explanatory gap results from special concepts rather than non-physical properties, an early statement of the phenomenal concepts strategy.[13]
1993 Publication David Papineau publishes "Physicalism, Consciousness, and the Antipathetic Fallacy", introducing the "antipathetic fallacy" — the idea that phenomenal and physical concepts of the same state feel intuitively distinct even though they refer to the same thing, producing an illusion of an explanatory gap — the core idea underlying all of Papineau's later Type-B defenses.[14]
1993 Publication David Papineau publishes Philosophical Naturalism, defending the view that consciousness, meaning, and knowledge can all be accommodated within a naturalist, physicalist worldview, and diagnosing the intuition that consciousness is non-physical as a confusion arising from the special structure of human imagination — the book-length companion to his AJP paper on the antipathetic fallacy published the same year.[15]
1993 Publication David Chalmers completes his PhD dissertation Toward a Theory of Consciousness at Indiana University, developing the supervenience-based framework and conceivability arguments that consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical — the direct precursor to The Conscious Mind and the source of the conceivability arguments that would become the principal target of later Type-B responses.[16]
1994 Publication David Lewis publishes "Reduction of Mind", defending psychophysical reduction while emphasizing the distinction between conceptual and metaphysical necessity — Lewis explicitly addresses Frank Jackson's knowledge argument here, holding that Mary gains new abilities upon seeing color rather than new factual information, a key move in the Type-B response to the knowledge argument.[17]
1995 Publication David Chalmers publishes "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, coining the term "hard problem" and giving the conceivability argument its widely-cited public debut a year before The Conscious Mind.[18]
1996 Classification introduced David Chalmers publishes The Conscious Mind, setting out the a priori/a posteriori entailment distinction that Chalmers would formally label Type-A and Type-B materialism in his 1999 reply to critics; Chalmers identifies philosophers such as David Lewis and David Armstrong as exemplars of positions that would later be classified as Type-B.[19]
1997 Publication Brian Loar publishes a revised version of "Phenomenal States" in Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere's edited volume The Nature of Consciousness, further developing the phenomenal concepts strategy.[20]
1997 Publication Christopher Hill (philosopher) publishes "Imaginability, Conceivability, Possibility and the Mind-Body Problem", arguing that the apparent conceivability of mind-body separability stems from distinct imaginative faculties (sympathetic versus perceptual imagination) rather than from any genuine metaphysical gap, a response to Kripke's modal argument that would become an influential contribution to the Type-B literature.[21]
1997 Publication David Chalmers publishes "Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness", a lengthy response to 26 commentaries on his 1995 "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness", addressing deflationary critiques, non-reductive critiques, and positive proposals, sharpening the target that later phenomenal concept strategies would need to engage.[22]
1998 Publication Christopher Hill publishes "Chalmers on the Apriority of Modal Knowledge", critiquing the modal-epistemological foundations of Chalmers' anti-materialist argument in The Conscious Mind — a direct challenge that provoked Chalmers to formalize the Type-A/Type-B materialism distinction explicitly in his reply the following year.[23]
1999 Publication Christopher Hill and Brian McLaughlin publish "There Are Fewer Things in Reality Than Are Dreamt of in Chalmers's Philosophy", part of a four-paper Philosophy and Phenomenological Research symposium on The Conscious Mind that directly provoked Chalmers' reply formalizing the Type-A/Type-B materialism distinction.[24]
1999 Publication David Chalmers publishes "Materialism and the Metaphysics of Modality" in response to a symposium on The Conscious Mind (including papers by Hill and Brian McLaughlin, Brian Loar, Sydney Shoemaker, and Stephen Yablo), explicitly naming and formalizing the "Type-A materialism" and "Type-B materialism" labels that would define the terminology this timeline uses.[25]
1999 Publication Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker publish "Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap", defending physicalism while acknowledging explanatory difficulties and arguing against the requirement that physical theories provide a priori conceptual entailments of phenomenal truths.[26]
1999 Publication Katalin Balog publishes "Conceivability, Possibility, and the Mind-Body Problem", arguing that Chalmers' zombie conceivability argument is self-undermining because an analogous argument, run "in the mouth of a zombie," would lead to a false conclusion — an influential internal defense of physicalism against conceivability arguments that established Balog as a leading phenomenal-concept-strategy theorist.[27]
2000 Publication Michael Tye publishes Consciousness, Color, and Content, defending representationalism and treating the explanatory gap as a kind of cognitive illusion rather than evidence of a genuine epistemic or ontological gap — a position that sits ambiguously between Type-A and Type-B materialism depending on how the "cognitive illusion" framing is read.[28]
2001 Publication David Chalmers and Frank Jackson publish "Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation", arguing that reductive explanation of the phenomenal requires a priori entailment from microphysical truths to phenomenal truths — directly rebutting Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker's 1999 Type-B defense and prompting extensive Type-B physicalist responses on the role of conceptual analysis in resisting the conceivability and explanatory-gap arguments.[29]
2002 Publication David Papineau publishes Thinking About Consciousness, defending a Type-B physicalist account based on phenomenal concepts.[30]
2005 Publication Daniel Stoljar publishes "Physicalism and Phenomenal Concepts", dividing the phenomenal concepts strategy into several versions and arguing that none of them succeeds in defending physicalism against anti-physicalist arguments — an early and influential critique of the Type-B approach.[31]
2006 Publication Daniel Stoljar publishes Ignorance and Imagination: The Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness, arguing that explanatory gaps arise from our ignorance of relevant physical facts rather than implying dualism — an epistemic variant adjacent to, but distinct from, mainstream Type-B phenomenal-concept strategies.[32]
2007 Publication David Papineau publishes "Phenomenal and Perceptual Concepts" in Torin Alter and Sven Walter's edited volume Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge, extending the comparison between phenomenal and perceptual concepts and directly responding to David Chalmers' argument against the Type-B phenomenal concept strategy.[33]
2007 Publication David Chalmers publishes "Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap" in the same volume, presenting a "master argument" intended to show that no version of the phenomenal concept strategy can simultaneously explain our epistemic situation regarding consciousness and be physically explicable itself — directly targeting the Type-B approaches defended in Papineau's chapter.[34]
2007 Publication Torin Alter publishes "Does Representationalism Undermine the Knowledge Argument?" in the same volume, examining whether representationalist theories of consciousness (such as Tye's) can answer Jackson's knowledge argument without appeal to phenomenal concepts.[35]
2009 Publication Katalin Balog publishes "Phenomenal Concepts" in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, surveying the phenomenal concept strategy and developing a "constitutional account" on which phenomenal concept tokens are partly constituted by the very experiences they refer to.[36]
2010 Publication Daniel Stoljar publishes Physicalism, a systematic introduction to the doctrine covering its history, formulation, and the central challenges from conceivability and the explanatory gap, situating his own epistemic approach within the wider physicalist landscape including Type-B responses.[37]
2011 Publication David Papineau publishes "Phenomenal Concepts and the Private Language Argument", examining whether positing phenomenal concepts is consistent with Wittgenstein's private language argument, and concluding that it is not — a self-critical stress-test of his own Type-B framework from inside the camp.[38]
2012 Publication Katalin Balog publishes "In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy", directly responding to David Chalmers' 2007 master argument and defending a "constitutional" account in which phenomenal concepts are constituted by the very experiences they pick out, explaining the appearance of an epistemic gap without requiring any non-physical properties.[39]
2017 Publication Brian P. McLaughlin publishes "Type Materialism for Phenomenal Consciousness" in Susan Schneider and Max Velmans' edited The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness (2nd edition), giving a handbook-level defense of Type-B materialism as one of the principal physicalist responses to the hard problem — McLaughlin's return to the topic nearly two decades after his 1999 paper with Hill.[40]
2018 Publication Janet Levin publishes "Once More Unto the Breach: Type B Physicalism, Phenomenal Concepts, and the Epistemic Gap", arguing that physicalists have lost confidence in Type-B physicalism too readily and have retreated to less promising defenses, when in fact the resources of phenomenal-concept-based Type-B physicalism remain underestimated and the relevant battles have "already been won".[41]
2020 Publication Daniel Stoljar publishes "The Epistemic Approach to the Problem of Consciousness" in Uriah Kriegel's edited The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, restating his epistemic view that explanatory limitations regarding consciousness reflect contingent ignorance of relevant physical facts rather than any metaphysical gap — a view closer to Type-C materialism and mysterianism than to the mainstream phenomenal-concept-strategy form of Type-B physicalism.[42]

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References

  1. ↑ Place, U. T. (1956). "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?" (PDF). British Journal of Psychology. 47 (1): 44–50. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  2. ↑ Smart, J. J. C. (1959). "Sensations and Brain Processes" (PDF). The Philosophical Review. 68 (2): 141–156. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  3. ↑ Lewis, David (1966). "An Argument for the Identity Theory" (PDF). The Journal of Philosophy. 63 (1): 17–25. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  4. ↑ Armstrong, D. M. (1968). A Materialist Theory of the Mind. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  5. ↑ Lewis, David (1970). "How to Define Theoretical Terms". The Journal of Philosophy. 67 (13): 427–446.
  6. ↑ Lewis, David (1972). "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications" (PDF). Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 50 (3): 249–258. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  7. ↑ Nagel, Thomas (1974). "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (PDF). The Philosophical Review. 83 (4): 435–450. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  8. ↑ Kripke, Saul (1980). Naming and Necessity (PDF). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  9. ↑ Lewis, David (1980). "Mad Pain and Martian Pain". In Block, Ned (ed.). Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I (PDF). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 216–222. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  10. ↑ Jackson, Frank (1982). "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (PDF). The Philosophical Quarterly. 32 (127): 127–136. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  11. ↑ Levine, Joseph (1983). "Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap" (PDF). Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. 64 (4): 354–361. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  12. ↑ McGinn, Colin (1989). "Can We Solve the Mind–Body Problem?" (PDF). Mind. 98 (391): 349–366. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  13. ↑ Loar, Brian (1990). "Phenomenal States". Philosophical Perspectives. 4: 81–108. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  14. ↑ Papineau, David (1993). "Physicalism, Consciousness, and the Antipathetic Fallacy". Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 71 (2): 169–183.
  15. ↑ Papineau, David (1993). Philosophical Naturalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  16. ↑ Chalmers, David John (1993). Toward a Theory of Consciousness. Dissertation, Indiana University. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  17. ↑ Lewis, David (1994). "Reduction of Mind". In Guttenplan, Samuel (ed.). A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (PDF). Cambridge: Blackwell. pp. 412–431. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  18. ↑ Chalmers, David J. (1995). "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (PDF). Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2 (3): 200–219. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  19. ↑ Chalmers, David (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  20. ↑ Loar, Brian (1997). "Phenomenal States". In Block, Ned; Flanagan, Owen; Güzeldere, Güven (eds.). The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 597–616. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  21. ↑ Hill, Christopher S. (1997). "Imaginability, Conceivability, Possibility and the Mind-Body Problem" (PDF). Philosophical Studies. 87 (1): 61–85. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  22. ↑ Chalmers, David J. (1997). "Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness". Journal of Consciousness Studies. 4 (1): 3–46. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  23. ↑ Hill, Christopher S. (1998). "Chalmers on the Apriority of Modal Knowledge". Analysis. 58 (1): 20–26. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  24. ↑ Hill, Christopher S.; McLaughlin, Brian P. (1999). "There Are Fewer Things in Reality Than Are Dreamt of in Chalmers's Philosophy". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 59 (2): 445–454. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  25. ↑ Chalmers, David J. (1999). "Materialism and the Metaphysics of Modality". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 59 (2): 473–496. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  26. ↑ Block, Ned; Stalnaker, Robert (1999). "Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap" (PDF). The Philosophical Review. 108 (1): 1–46. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  27. ↑ Balog, Katalin (1999). "Conceivability, Possibility, and the Mind-Body Problem" (PDF). The Philosophical Review. 108 (4): 497–528. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  28. ↑ Tye, Michael (2000). Consciousness, Color, and Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  29. ↑ Chalmers, David J.; Jackson, Frank (2001). "Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation" (PDF). The Philosophical Review. 110 (3): 315–360. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  30. ↑ Papineau, David (2002). Thinking About Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  31. ↑ Stoljar, Daniel (2005). "Physicalism and Phenomenal Concepts". Mind & Language. 20 (2): 296–302. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  32. ↑ Stoljar, Daniel (2006). Ignorance and Imagination: The Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  33. ↑ Papineau, David (2007). "Phenomenal and Perceptual Concepts". In Alter, Torin; Walter, Sven (eds.). Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 111–144. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  34. ↑ Chalmers, David J. (2007). "Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap". In Alter, Torin; Walter, Sven (eds.). Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism (PDF). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 167–194. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  35. ↑ Alter, Torin (2007). "Does Representationalism Undermine the Knowledge Argument?". In Alter, Torin; Walter, Sven (eds.). Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 65–76.
  36. ↑ Balog, Katalin (2009). "Phenomenal Concepts". In Beckermann, Ansgar; McLaughlin, Brian P.; Walter, Sven (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind (PDF). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 292–312. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  37. ↑ Stoljar, Daniel (2010). Physicalism (PDF). New Problems of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  38. ↑ Papineau, David (2011). "Phenomenal Concepts and the Private Language Argument". American Philosophical Quarterly. 48 (2): 175–184. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  39. ↑ Balog, Katalin (2012). "In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 84 (1): 1–23. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  40. ↑ McLaughlin, Brian P. (2017). "Type Materialism for Phenomenal Consciousness". In Schneider, Susan; Velmans, Max (eds.). The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness (2nd ed.). Hoboken: Wiley. pp. 415–429.
  41. ↑ Levin, Janet (2018). "Once More Unto the Breach: Type B Physicalism, Phenomenal Concepts, and the Epistemic Gap". Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 97 (1): 57–71. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
  42. ↑ Stoljar, Daniel (2020). "The Epistemic Approach to the Problem of Consciousness". In Kriegel, Uriah (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 482–496. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
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