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qualia: The subjective qualities of conscious experience (plural of the Latin singular quale). Examples are the way sugar tastes, the way vermilion looks, the way coffee smells, the way a cat's purr sounds, the way it feels to stub your toe. Accounting for these features of mental states has been one of the biggest obstacles to materialist solutions to the mind- body problem, because it seems impossible to analyze the subjective character of these phenomena, which are comprehensible only from the point of view of certain types of conscious being, in objective physical terms which are comprehensible to any rational individual independently of his particular sensory faculties.

T.N.
See also Subjectivity; consciousness, its irreducibility.
Bibliography T. Nagel, 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?', Philosophical Review (1974).
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, © Oxford University Press 1995

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