The Explanatory Gap and the Communicability of Subjective Experience : Artistic Expression and Experiential Access

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates to what extent artistic expression can communicate aspects of subjective experience that resist conceptual representation. With a starting point in the explanatory gap, it argues that the persistence of the gap reveals a structural limitation in conceptual language itself. By operating through abstraction and public intelligibility, conceptual language is constitutively third-personal and therefore systematically excludes the first-person, qualitative character of phenomenal experience. Drawing on Langer’s account of symbolic form, the thesis argues that artistic expression operates through a fundamentally different communicative structure, preserving sensory, affective, and relational dimensions of experience without reducing them to propositional content. While artistic expression does not eliminate the explanatory gap, it may partially bridge the limitations in communicating phenomenal experience that conceptual language cannot overcome.