Defending Phenomenal Explanationism: Responses to Fumerton, Huemer, McAllister, Piazza, Steup and Zhang

If a book is evaluated by the caliber of its critics, then Appearance & Explanation (A&E) is a smashing success. We could not have asked for better critics to discuss our book for this symposium. Each raises numerous issues that are worthy of careful consideration and extended discussion. Unfortunately, due to the limited word count with which we are working, we cannot hope to address them all. We can only offer brief replies to the objections to Phenomenal Explanationism (PE) that we do discuss, and must forgo responding to criticism of our objections to Phenomenal Conservatism (PC). We hope what we say is enough to indicate the ways in which we think PE can be defended. In what follows, we provide responses to each critic in alphabetical order. We would like to thank all the contributors for taking the time to read A&E so carefully and for writing such engaging critiques. We are especially grateful to Matthias Steup for all of his work organizing this symposium.