# Phenomenal Contrast -A Critique **Keywords:** knowledge of consciousness, phenomenal contrast, minimal pair arguments, phenomenal character **Abstract:** Conscious experience is important to us in a personal sense: we have many different experiences each day and we care deeply about what they are like. Conscious experience is also at the centre of our efforts to come to know the world and our place in it; we learn about the world through experience, and experience constitutes data in both scientific and philosophical inquiry. Despite its importance, conscious experience is ill understood. An obstacle to improving our understanding is the problem of missing methods: we lack a way to determine what the character of a given experience actually is. Many debates hinge on what the characters of experiences are, so this is a problem worth taking seriously. An optimistic consensus has recently begun to arise, according to which phenomenal contrast arguments can provide us with answers about the character of conscious experience. Against this growing consensus I argue that important facts about human mental lives systematically block a large class of uses of phenomenal contrast from achieving their aim, and that these minimal pair arguments, as I dub them, therefore fail, quite generally. I show that a number of influential recent examples of phenomenal contrast are most reasonably interpreted as minimal pair arguments and therefore subject to the criticism. I also show that certain natural ways to attempt to rescue such arguments also fail, and reply to a number of objections. Minimal pair arguments cannot rationally persuade us of thei **Authors:** [[Ole Koksvik]]