Consciousness studies has burgeoned over the past 30 or more years, principally in response to dissatisfaction with the predominant reductionist theories of mind, including behaviorism, physicalism, and functionalism, and their offshoots in mental representationalism. The complaint centers upon the thought that although some of these theories may have captured the “psychological aspects” of mental phenomena, something essential—the “phenomenal aspects”—has been left out. But the suggested solutions are themselves disastrous, for they reintroduce the very “inner theater” of the mind as the domicile of unwieldy occupants that the “naturalist,” though her efforts were misguided, had good reason to reject.

Terms such as “qualia”; “conscious,” “phenomenal,” or “perceptual” “experiences”; and the “what-it-is-likeness” of mental states—indeed, even “conscious states”—are special philosophical ones which have no support from natural discourse: the discourse, incidentally, that provides the subject matter of the theories. These jargon terms, like “sense data,” “impressions,” “ideas,” and, indeed, even some philosophers’ talk of “sensations,” belong to philosophical theories that not only have intolerable consequences for the explanatory power of mental concepts and our right to suppose that others have minds, but also, at best, would render inexplicable our ability to understand and speak a language. I shall argue, however, the situation is worse: for the thought experiments introducing these special terms cannot even be cogently described. The terms should be banished and the theories to which they belong rejected.

This is not a recommendation for the “naturalist” theories that precipitated the rebellion, for these too have untenable consequences for the explanatory power of mental predicates and introduce their own epistemic and semantic difficulties. Indeed, the dueling parties share so much common ground that they can be described as two sides of a bad coin, for both today's reductionist and nonreductionist “naturalists” are committed to what Ryle dubbed “one big category mistake.” I agree with Ryle—and with Wittgenstein—that the battle between philosophical theories that attempt to find a place for the mind in a physical world ultimately depends on a mistaken view about the workings of mental discourse, although I will only be able to present part of the negative story here.