Journal of Consciousness Studies, 26, No. 9–10, 2019, pp. 257–69 Anna Wierzbicka From ‘Consciousness’ to ‘I Think, I Feel, I Know’ A Commentary on David Chalmers Abstract: David Chalmers appears to assume that we can meaning- fully discuss what goes on in human heads without paying any attention to the words in which we couch our statements. This paper challenges this assumption and argues that the initial problem is that of metalanguage: if we want to say something clear and valid about us humans, we must think about ourselves outside conceptual English created by one particular history and culture and try to think from a global, panhuman point of view. This means that instead of relying on untranslatable English words such as ‘consciousness’ and ‘experi- ence’ we must try to rely on panhuman concepts expressed in cross- translatable words such as THINK, KNOW, and FEEL (Wierzbicka, 2018). The paper argues that after ‘a hundred years of consciousness studies’ it is time to try to say something about us (humans), about how we think and how we differ from cats and bats, in words that are clear, stable, and human rather than parochially English. 1. The Trap: Reifying Abstract Nouns As I see it, the main problem with David Chalmers’ paper ‘The Meta- Problem of Consciousness’ (2018) is that it doesn’t problematize the term ‘consciousness’. Instead of recognizing ‘consciousness’ for what it is — one of Bentham’s (1843, in Ogden, 1932) ‘fictitious entities’ created by an English abstract noun — it reifies it; it asks questions about it that could be productively asked about ‘real entities’, such as Correspondence: Anna Wierzbicka, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Email: Anna.Wierzbicka@anu.edu.au Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2019 For personal use only -- not for reproduction